Digital Financial Reporting

XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting

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Digital Financial Reporting Using XBRL

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This web site provides information on how to use XBRL to help business professionals exchange business information. Business information incluldes both financial and nonfinancial information. Everything on this site made available to all under a Creative Commons License, Public Domain Dedication. Everything may be reused however one sees fit without attribution. We do ask that you give credit where credit is due. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, ideas or other feedback, please contact charles.hoffman@me.com.

The author of this web site assumes all responsibility for this web site and it's content. The views expressed on this web site are the views of the author and may not represent the views of his employer.

BLOG: Digital Financial Reporting

This is a blog for information relating to digital financial reporting. This blog is basically my "lab notebook" for experimenting and learning about XBRL-based digital financial reporting. This is my brain storming platform. This is where I think out loud (i.e. publicly) about digital financial reporting. This information is for innovators and early adopters who are ushering in a new era of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis in a digital environment.

Much of the information contained in this blog is synthasized, summarized, condensed, better organized and articulated in my book XBRL for Dummies and in the chapters of Intelligent XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Entries from June 17, 2012 - June 23, 2012

XBRL, Excel, and Python

I don't really know python, but I hear a lot of really good things about it. I do know a lot about Excel. But, it seems that combining these things would be incredibly useful:

Arelle: An open source XBRL processor built using python.
IronSpread: A way to use python within Excel.
Python-Excel: Other stuff related to getting things into and out of Excel using python.

This I absolutely agree with: "learn to code". You don't need to learn to be a programmer, just learn to code. Huge difference.

Introduction to Python video

Parsing XBRL with Python

I have fiddled around with programming my entire career. I started with Lotus 1-2-3 macros, rBase which is a relational database, moved to Excel when it still used the old macro language, really jumped into Excel when it moved to VBA, jumped into programming even more when Microsoft Access which was released (started with macros, but then switched to VBA), and even fiddled with Visual Basic .Net. I like VB.Net and wish Excel and Access would switch from VBA to .Net; not sure if that will ever happen.

Along the way I learned SQL, HTML, HTTP, XML, XSLT, regular expressions, ASP, CSS, RDF/OWL, XSL-FO, XQuery, XML Schema, and other odds and ends to varying degrees. It is a hobby which fits nicely into the accounting work I do. And yeah...I learned a bit about XBRL also!

Programming is fun, but I would not want to do it for a living.

Posted on Saturday, June 23, 2012 at 12:01PM by

Charlie in General Information |