@nm : I'd be lying if I said that this hadn't crossed my mind several times. There are already many MaplePrimes users that do frequent the Stack Exchange pages (mostly the Stack Overflow and Mathematics sites). I even have a filter that checks for new "Maple" related posts across all stack exchange sites: http://stackexchange.com/filters/247545/maple

I don't see any major reason why as a group of Maple users, we couldn't propose a new Maple Stack Exchange site, however the problem is simply that to get a new Stack Exchange site up and running takes a lot of motivated users. See here for more details on the process of staging a new site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

Personally, I'm happy to see both exist, as I do feel like they offer slightly different features and experiences. In fact, I do often see a lot of other stack users redirecting questions to MaplePrimes when an 'expert' answer is required, which speaks volumes about our community here.

@acer : Yes, you're correct, I had misread the original post. So we'll file this as shortcoming in the numeric formatting mechanism.

@David Moss Thanks for submitting this post. I suggested to David to start this post to generate exactly this kind of dialogue.

@Carl Love I can definitely see where you're coming from and do ultimately agree that we should tend toward to having fewer and more intuitive commands whenever possible.

The case that you mention does definitely work, but I was also concerned with other cases like:

DS:=DataSeries(<"a","b">,datatype=string);

DataSeries(DS,datatype=name);

returns an error, whereas the following works:

DataSeries(((x)->convert(x,name))~(DS),datatype=name);

Now I'm guessing that you would argue that we should just make the DataSeries( foo, datatype=type) just work, which would be nice and very simple, but I'm still not convinced that it should be the job of the DataSeries command itself to change the data into a given datatype.

Using the Matrix example:

M:=Matrix(<<1,2>|<"a","b">>,datatype=anything);

Matrix(M,datatype=string);

Returns an error. This is similar to the DataSeries constructor in that it does not attempt to change the data into the different datatype.

This will definitely be a good point to debate once beta season rolls around...

@Carl Love : While it is pretty straight forward to accomplish this for string -> numeric, I think that it is rather desirable for users to have a more general command that can change entries in a DataSeries from one datatype to an another arbitrary datatype. For example, parse will work in the case of going from string to numeric, but we would need to map convert or some other command onto the entries in order to, say, change the datatype of the entries from string to name.

Now, this functionality is actually something that I've already added into Maple 2017. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to instead just specify Datatype( DataSeries, type ) and have Maple work out the rest. That said, the primary function of this new function is actually going to be a little different than what I've said above: it first changes the indicated datatype of the DataSeries, and then attempts to coerce the entries in the DataSeries to that datatype.

This is probably a better indication of what the planned command will do:

DS := DataSeries( [1,2,3], datatype = integer );

SubsDatatype( DS, float );

Output:

DataSeries( [1.,2.,3.], datatype = float );

@Mariusz Iwaniuk : You might also find this plot interesting:

Explore(plot(([Re, Im])(x^k), x = -2 .. 2, view = [-2 .. 2, -3 .. 3], legend = ["Re", "Im"]), k = 1.0 .. 3)

@Mariusz Iwaniuk : It's usually not advised to use the view option without specifying the entire view for x,y,... in list notation.

Try this instead:

Explore(plot(x^k, x = -2 .. 2, view = [-2 .. 2, -3 .. 3]), k = 1.0 .. 3)

However, I'm guessing that you might also want to view the real values for x^k for x = -2..0 (since these values have imaginary terms, you won't see anything for x=-2..0 for any exponent that's not an integer value), so this might also help:

Explore(plot(Re(x^k), x = -2 .. 2, view = [-2 .. 2, -3 .. 3]), k = 1.0 .. 3)

@Milos Bilik : It sounds like you may have a good solution, but given that your data has a mixture of floating point values, dates, and column header information, perhaps a DataFrame would be another option for storage. If you use the Import command to read in your Excel file, it should automatically use a DataFrame for storage, which can then be used for subsequent statistical analysis. 

@Christopher2222 Ha, very good. I borrowed this graphic from the front page of Quand's website. Maple would look very good there wouldn't it!

@Markiyan Hirnyk : I'm not sure that I follow the question. Typically the notion of "statistical tables" is associated with tables of known values derived from probability distributions, most commonly found in the backs of statistics text books.

The data that I'm using above is imported from measured data for several macroeconomic variables stored in a tabular data structure. If this is that you're referring to by "statistical table", I would say that the benefits from visualizing tables of data are numerous.

I like to visualize data sets in order to quickly understand the characteristics of a data set, in order to spot trends and get a better sense of what the data is telling me. Using this information, you can start to speculate on patterns and other key information locked inside the columns of information. For example, the illustration that I have provided can be used to suggest that there may be some pattern with respect to higher gross domestic product leading to longer lifespan (the trend over time seems to be up and to the right for all countries).

Due to a bug in the 2016.1 update, a new update 2016.1a is now available. We recommend that anyone who updated to 2016.1 install this update. If you have not installed the 2016.1 update, this newer update supersedes the previous update so you will only need to install the newer update.

You can download the update from the Maplesoft homepage here: http://www.maplesoft.com/support/downloads/m2016_1aupdate.aspx

Or by running 'Check for Updates' from inside of Maple.

An update that fixes this issue is available at the Maplesoft homepage: https://www.maplesoft.com/support/downloads/m2016_1aupdate.aspx

The automatic update in Maple should go live soon.

As @Christopher2222 noted, an update that fixes this issue is available at the Maplesoft homepage: https://www.maplesoft.com/support/downloads/m2016_1aupdate.aspx

The automatic update in Maple should go live soon.

@Muhammad Ali : If you're asking specifically about the Workbook feature in Maple, along with several behind the scenes bug fixes, a couple of minor features were added:

- Ability to attach mulitple files to a Workbook file through the file explorer pop-up

- Thumbnails for MapleCloud in Workbooks

Thanks for the report. We've been able to reproduce this issue and are working on a fix that will be released asap.

Could you provide a couple of short examples so that we can try and reproduce these issues? It would be beneficial to also know where you are copying to (as well as confirming if you are using 2D math or not).