I was sitting on my laurels this morning watching activity through the new APPSTREAM instances of directEDGAR when I received two separate emails about improving the experience. The first one was wondering if we could install Python and the second was a request for a spreadsheet program to more readily review CSV artifacts that are created using the platform.

I should have thought of adding a program to more naturally open csv files. I apologize – I had tunnel vision the last few weeks as I was much more worried about the config files and managing disk permissions to give you fuller access to the archive. I will be adding an open source spreadsheet program before the week is out. We can’t add Office unless we buy a use license for each user and I would not know how to budget for that.

The notion of adding Python is very intriguing and it is also seems possible. You have read access to all of the SEC filings in directEDGAR.

The basic work flow with our platform is to first Search for relevant documents – and while we have great tools to assist your Extraction and Normalization of content there are plenty of use cases where you might want to use Python to achieve a more finer grained Extraction and Normalization process than our tools offer.

I was initially imagining you would use the DocumentExtraction feature to access specific documents – compress them – move them locally and then run your own code. But the more I think about the argument/suggestion/comment I received this morning the more I understand the value of this. We are going to look into this and see what is necessary. I believe we can do this – the challenge will be to find the right compromise on the version and installed libraries.