Hey, I’m just learning Python but am curious in starting business applications for it right away. For my job I run a bunch of daily auditing reports and I’d like to automate them. Here is what I want to do:
Download data in Excel (.csv) from company website
Paste into another Excel file which contains the report
Create a PDF printout of report
Attach both the Excel file and PDF to an email, then send to a group of people.
Python is known as being the “swiss army knife” of programming languages. Its simple, but capable. As such Python is very capable for being able to automate tasks in a “system admin” sort of role.
If you wanted to program a Python script, you could build a program using the following for each of your steps:
Downloading data from the internet is well documented.
Updating excel files will probably require a library, like openpyxl
Creating a PDF is supported by multiple libraries (at least according to this SO post)
Now that is a lot of work, and will require a lot of time to build, debug and maintain. An alternate approach is one talked about in the book Automate the Boring Stuff. Where you simply make Python manage your mouse and inputsfor you. This is a little more finicky, but might be easier implement than building an entire program around your tasks.