How to (intermittently) skip certain cells when running IPython notebook?

Though this isn't exactly what you seem to be looking for, if you wish to entirely omit the execution of a cell (where no cached results are loaded), you can add the following hack at the beginning of a cell (assuming you are using a unix-based OS):

%%script false 

or a variant (working as of early 2020 -- see here for explanation) :

%%script false --no-raise-error

Currently, there is no such feature included in the IPython notebook. Nevertheless, there are some possibilities to make your life easier, like:

• use the %store or maybe better the %%cache magic (extension) to store the results of these intermittently cells, so they don't have to be recomputed (see https://github.com/rossant/ipycache)

• add a if==0: before the cells you don't want to execute

• convert these cells to raw cells (but you will loose the already stored output!)

(see discussion at https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/2125)

Jakob

If no cached results are expected to be loaded, I find the Freeze nbextension quite useful to this end.

Although unofficial, I strongly recommend to give these notebook extensions a try if you have never used them before.

To install the extension machinery,

$ pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions && jupyter contrib nbextension install

To enable the Freeze extension, launch jupyter notebook and open a new notebook, from the menu select Edit > nbextensions config, and then check Freeze.