Notebook basics

The notebook distinguishes to two different navigation modes:

Command mode: cursor keys can be used to move the highlighted cell. Press enter to move from Command mode to Edit mode.
In edit mode, the content of a cell can be changed. To complete editing the cell, press SHIFT+RETURN to execute the cell or ESCAPE to go back to Command mode.

We recommend taking a tour of the notebook at some point (Help -> User Interface tour), and to explore the available short cuts (Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts).

Displaying objects



In [1]:

    
a = [10, 20, 30]   # create an example object
b = 42  # create another object

The standard method to display an object to standard output (that's normally the screen), is the print command:



In [2]:

    
print(a)









    



[10, 20, 30]

Within the notebook, the object or value of the last line is displayed:



In [3]:

    
a









    Out[3]:





[10, 20, 30]



In [4]:

    
a
b









    Out[4]:





42

To display multiple values within one cell, we need to use the print function:



In [5]:

    
print(a)
print(b)









    



[10, 20, 30]
42

If we want to supress output of the value/object of the last line, we can add ;:



In [6]:

    
a;



In [7]:

    
a









    Out[7]:





[10, 20, 30]

Cell splitting, merging, moving

A number of useful commands are available under Edit, including merging, splitting and moving of cells within one notebook.

For many of those, there are shortcuts available. Use Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts to learn the short cut.

Inserting cells

We can insert cells via Insert -> Insert Cell Above or Insert -> Insert Cell Below. The short cuts in command mode are a (for above) and b (for below).

Execution of all cells

All cells in a notebook, or a subset (above or below the current cell) can be executed via the Cell menu.

Tidy up notebook at end of exploration

A useful command is Kernel -> Restart & Run all which

restarts the Python kernel
executes all cells in the notebook in order from the beginning.

This is useful to

ensure that all commands execute when the cells are called in linear order
obtain increasing numbering of input and output cells

Exporting notebooks

Notebooks can be exported to other file formats via the File -> Download as menu.