Download 10,000 Days of Free Weather Data for Almost Any Location Worldwide
A very cool demonstration of PowerPivot with weather data.
I don’t have PowerPivot (or Office 2010) but will be correcting that in the near future.
Pointers to importing diverse data into PowerPivot?
Importing UK Weather Data from Azure Marketplace into PowerPivot by Chris Webb.
From the post:
I don’t always agree with everything Rob Collie says, much as I respect him, but his recent post on the Windows Azure Marketplace (part of which used to be known as the Azure Datamarket) had me nodding my head. The WAM has been around for a while now and up until recently I didn’t find anything much there that I could use in my day job; I had the distinct feeling it was going to be yet another Microsoft white elephant. The appearance of the DateStream date dimension table (see here for more details) was for me a turning point, and a month ago I saw something really interesting: detailed weather data for the UK from the Met Office (the UK’s national weather service) is now available there too. OK, it’s not going to be very useful for anyone outside the UK, but the UK is my home market and for some of my customers the ability to do things like use weather forecasts to predict footfall in shops will be very useful. It’s exactly the kind of data that analysts want to find in a data market, and if the WAM guys can add other equally useful data sets they should soon reach the point where WAM is a regular destination for all PowerPivot users.
Importing this weather data into PowerPivot isn’t completely straightforward though – the data itself is quite complex. The Datamarket guys are working on some documentation for it but in the meantime I thought I’d blog about my experiences; I need to thank Max Uritsky and Ziv Kaspersky for helping me out on this.
I don’t live in the UK nor do I use PowerPivot but I suspect readers of this blog may fall into either category or both. In any event, learning more about data sources, import and even software is always a useful thing.
All of those are likely to be sources you will need or encounter when authoring a topic map.
Interesting that while Amazon is striving to bring “big data” processing skills to everyone, the importing of data remains a roadblock for some users. Standard exports for particular data sets may become a commodity.
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