Colab is a free Jupyter notebook environment that runs entirely in the cloud. Most importantly, it does not require a setup and the notebooks that you create can be simultaneously edited by your team members – just the way you edit documents in Google Docs
In my day to day work as a digital analyst I have found the following capabilities supercharge my effectiveness at producing analysis. These also allow for repeatable analysis and reviews of analysis that may have been performed a long time ago:
- Using Google Drive as a filesystem
- Reading from, and writing to Google Sheets
- Querying BigQuery
Using Google drive as a filesystem
With csv files or other files saved on google drive it is possible to interact with them via Google Colab
Reading from, and writing to Google Sheets
Google sheets is an often used tool in businesses as it allows for collaboration in spreadsheets. Being able to read and write from these will prove invaluable.
Querying Big Query
Getting data out of a modern data warehouse is a huge win!