I hate empty cells for another reason - it busts your moving shortcuts. I rely on Ctrl clicking on arrows to get up and down a spreadsheet fast. Blanks slow your moving to crawl.
Is there a specific aspect of pandas research you're interested in? There are a lot of useful guides around table-based workflows that might be helpful :).
I would start w/ different strategies on how to model data in tables. One problem that I often see in pandas data analyses is people treating the data like it's a web app database (many small, normalized tables), rather than joining the data into a few big, denormalized tables. The latter makes it easier for people to answer their own questions / vs relying on a bunch of tiny custom functions someone wrote!
Data Organization in Spreadsheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790545 - Aug 2018 (27 comments)