seems to me like you need to learn some basic programming to cleanse and reformat data. Since you listed python here already, it may be that you already know so

seems to me like you need to learn some basic programming to cleanse and reformat data. Since you listed python here already, it may be that you already know some basic programming but if a program takes forever you probably need to learn about algorithmic complexity. You may program something that's in principal correct but may be very expensive to calculate. This link seems to cover the basics http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&d2=complexity1 http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&... So other than that, there's the R language that's pretty good for statistical analysis of data. If you're serious about data analysis, learning to program and either improving your skillset in python or learning a dedicated data analysis language like R will help the most.