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Problem (and solution) to a pandas join issue in data analysis tutorial

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UPDATE: after further experimentation, I found out that the problem is that the dataframe returned by Quandl.get() does not have proper column names (they are just "values" ). Thus the data for each state has same name (value). I found that loop works if I set the column name manually:
df = Quandl.get(query, authtoken=api_key)
df.columns = [abbv]  ### This is the fix ###

In the video they somehow get the proper column names automatically.
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Hi,

I was going through the data analysis tutorial where you talk about how to join together to pandas dataframes, and I think there might have been some change in the pandas default behavior or something because the example code does not work as it currently is. For example, in the 7th tutorial the code

   main_df = main_df.join(df)

generates the following error:
ValueError: columns overlap but no suffix specified: Index([u'Value'], dtype='object')

after a lot of hair pulling I found that I can get it running like this:
main_df = main_df.join(df, lsuffix=abbv)

where abbv is the US state abbreviation (it just needs to be some text for the suffix)

or maybe my pandas/spyder is somehow misconfigured.