Notebook outputs and results

After you attach a notebook to a cluster and run one or more cells, your notebook has state and displays outputs. This section describes how to manage notebook state and outputs.

Clear notebooks state and outputs

To clear the notebook state and outputs, select one of the Clear options at the bottom of the Run menu.

Results table

When a cell is run, results are shown in a results table. With the results table, you can do the following:

• Copy a column or other subset of tabular results data to the clipboard.
• Do a text search over the results table.
• Sort and filter data.
• Navigate between table cells using the keyboard arrow keys.
• Select part of a column name or cell value by double-clicking and dragging to select the desired text.

To view limits on the results table, see Notebook results table limits.

Select data

To select data in the results table, do any of the following.

• Copy the data or a subset of the data to the clipboard.
• Click a column or row header.
• Click in the upper-left cell of the table to select the entire table.
• Drag your cursor across any set of cells to select them.

To open a side panel displaying selection information, click the panel icon icon in the upper-right corner, next to the Search box.

Copy data to clipboard

To copy the results table in CSV format to the clipboard, click the downward arrow next to the table title tab, then click Copy results to clipboard.

Alternatively, click the box in the table's top left to select the full table, and then right-click and select Copy from the drop-down menu.

There are several ways to copy selected data:

• Press Cmd + C on MacOS or Ctrl + C on Windows to copy the results to the clipboard in CSV format.
• Right-click and select Copy to copy the results to the clipboard in CSV format.
• Right click and select Copy as to copy the selected data in CSV, TSV, or Markdown format.

Sort results

To sort the results table by the values in a column, hover your cursor over the column name. An icon containing the column name appears at the right of the cell. Click the arrow to sort the column.

To sort by multiple columns, hold down the Shift key as you click the sort arrow for the columns.

Sorting follows natural sort order by default. To enforce a lexicographical sort order, use ORDER BY in SQL or the respective SORT functions available in your environment.

Filter results

There are several ways to create a filter:

• Click at the upper-right of the cell results. In the dialog that appears, select the column to filter on and the filter rule and value to apply. For example:

  

• To add another filter, click .

• To temporarily enable or disable a filter, toggle the Enabled/Disabled button in the dialog. To delete a filter, click the X next to the filter name .

• To filter by a specific value, right-click on a cell with that value and select Filter by this value from the drop-down menu.

  

• To filter on a specific column, use the kebab menu in the column name:

  

By default, filters are applied only to the results shown in the results table. If the data returned is truncated (for example, when a query returns more than 10,000 rows or the dataset is larger than 2MB), the filter is applied only to the returned rows. A note in the top right of the table indicates that the filter was applied to truncated data.

You can choose to filter the full dataset instead. Click Truncated data, then choose Full dataset. Depending on the size of the dataset, it may take a long time for the filter to apply.

Format columns

Column headers indicate the data type of the column. For example, indicates integer data type. Hover over the indicator to see the data type.

You can format columns in results tables as types like Currency, Percentage, URL and more, with control over decimal places for clearer tables.

Format columns from the kebab menu in the column name.

Download results

By default, downloading results is enabled. To toggle this setting, see Manage the ability to download results from notebooks.

You can download a cell result that contains tabular output to your local machine. Click the downward pointing arrow next to the tab title. The menu options depend on the number of rows in the result and the Databricks Runtime version. Downloaded results are saved on your local machine as a CSV file with a name corresponding to your notebook name.

For notebooks connected to SQL warehouses, you can also download the results as an Excel file.

Explore SQL cell results

In a Databricks notebook, results from a SQL language cell are automatically available as a DataFrame assigned to the variable _sqldf. You can use the _sqldf variable to refer to the previous SQL output in subsequent Python and SQL cells. For details, see Explore SQL cell results.

View multiple outputs per cell

Python notebooks and %python cells in non-Python notebooks support multiple outputs per cell. For example, the output of the following code includes both the plot and the table:

import pandas as pd
from sklearn.datasets import load_iris

data = load_iris()
iris = pd.DataFrame(data=data.data, columns=data.feature_names)
ax = iris.plot()
print("plot")
display(ax)
print("data")
display(iris)

Resize outputs

Resize cell outputs by dragging the bottom right corner of the table or visualization.

Commit notebook outputs in Databricks Git folders

To learn about committing .ipynb notebook outputs, see Allow committing .ipynb notebook output.

• The notebook must be a .ipynb file
• Workspace admin settings must allow notebook outputs to be committed