Microsoft Azure Notebooks Set Up Tutorial

Table of Contents

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to show you how to get started with Microsoft Azure Notebooks.

Directly from their website, Microsoft Azure Notebooks is a free service that provides Jupyter notebooks along with supporting packages for R and Python. This means you can just login and get going since no installation/setup is necessary.

Essentially, this service allows you to run code right in your Web browser, without having to install software on your computer.

This tutorial will walk through how you can quickly get set up with a free account on Microsoft Azure Notebooks. From there, you will use this service in the coming weeks to:

Set Up Instructions

1. Go to https://notebooks.azure.com/.

You should see a page that looks like this.

Azure home page.

2. Click the Sign In button in the top right corner.

This will bring up a window like this.

Azure sign in/up window.

3. Set up your user ID.

You should now see a page that looks like this.

Azure user ID screen.

Please enter the same username you have for the MITx platform. If this username is already taken, then you can add additional letters or numbers to the end of it. If you cannot use this username because it contains invalid characters, then feel free to change it slightly so it works.

Once you are satisfied with your user ID, click the blue Save button. The dialog box should go away, and you should now have complete access to the Microsoft Azure Notebooks platform!

Troubleshooting

If you have any issues or questions setting up, here are the steps you should follow.

  1. See the Microsoft Azure Notebooks FAQ page. Your question may already be answered there.
  2. Make sure you have followed all of the steps exactly as above, including verifying your e-mail address and phone number with 2 separate security codes.
  3. Ask the course TA’s on the Discussion Forum.

Additional Resources

Microsoft Azure Notebooks has a bunch of great resources for programmers, both beginners and more advanced coders. Here are some examples:

To view and run the code for any of these libraries, first, click the Clone button at the top of the page.

Azure clone button.

Then, in the dialog box that comes up, just click the blue Clone button.

Clone again.

This will open up the exact same view of files, but now copied into your own personal library. See the steps below for how to use one of these notebooks.

Using a Notebook

You may be wondering - how exactly do I use one of these notebooks? Here’s some information to help answer that question.

First, here are some basics you need to know to get started:

For a lot more information, you can also check out the detailed information from the official Jupyter website.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial for getting started with Microsoft Azure Notebooks. This service will be a key part of the course moving forward as it will allow us to quickly share code with all students, have you run it in the browser, then submit the results.