This article is adapted from an edition of our Off the Charts newsletter originally published in October 2021. Off the Charts is a weekly, subscriber-only guide to The Economist’s award-winning data ...

Have you ever found yourself wrestling with Excel formulas, wishing for a more powerful tool to handle your data? Or maybe you’ve heard the buzz about Python in Excel and wondered if it’s truly the ...

os.path.join (folder, filename) ensures the path is correct for the system. On Windows, it uses backslashes (reports\summary.txt); on Linux and macOS it uses forward slashes (reports/summary.txt).