Managing a workbook

Maximum workbook size

Workbooks have a maximum size limit: the total size of all the files in a workbook cannot exceed 5GB for users on the DataLab Starter plan or 20GB for users on the DataLab Premium plan. This is a per-workbook limit, so free users could have 3 workbooks with 4 GB each, for example.

If the total size of all the files in a single workbooks exceeds the limit, you can no longer edit that workbook: through the file browser, you can remove files from the workbook filesystem to go below the limit again.

Saving your edits

All your edits are automatically saved. If you close and re-enter the workbook at a later point in time, all your work from before is saved. You can review and restore past versions of your notebooks through Version history.

Renaming a workbook

1. Click on 'File > Rename workbook' in the toolbar.

2. In the modal that appears specify the new workbook name and click "Rename Workbook".

Changing the workbook language

You can use either Python (version 3.8 or 3.10) or R (version 4.2 or 4.4) to execute code in your notebooks. The default language of your workbook is guessed based on your previous workbook. If it can't be guessed, you will be asked to specify a language.

To change the programming language yourself, click "Environment > Session Details" and select the programming language in the dropdown.

Note that this will not automatically edit/translate any code that may already exist in notebooks (e.g. you still have to convert a pd.read_csv() into readr::read_csv() when switching the language from Python to R).

Open up the Session Details

Session details dialog, where you can update the language

Python 3.8 versus Python 3.10

Python 3.10 comes with a lot of updated pre-installed packages compared to Python 3.8, most notably Pandas 2.x instead of 1.x. For a list of breaking changes, see the Pandas docs.

Deleting your workbook

If you wish to permanently delete your workbook click "File > Delete Workbook". Confirm the action.

Deleting a workbook is irreversible!