Duration
3 days
Overview
We are all probably spending time doing small manual tasks that don't add much value. It may be scanning through information sources in search of the small bits of relevant information, working with spreadsheets to generate the same graph over and over, or searching files one by one until we find the data we're looking for. Some - probably most - of those tasks are, in fact, automatable.
There's an investment upfront, but for the tasks that get repeated over and over, we can use
computers to do these kinds of menial tasks and focus our own efforts instead on what humans are good for - high-level analysis and decision making based on the result. This course will explain how to use the Python language to automate common business tasks that can be greatly sped up if a computer is doing them.
Chapter 1 – Let’s Begin Our Automation Journey
- Activating a virtual environment
- Installing third-party packages
- Creating strings with formatted values
- Manipulating strings
- Extracting data from structured strings
- Using a third-party tool – parse
- Introducing regular expressions
- Going deeper into regular expressions
- Adding command-line arguments
Chapter 2 – Automating Tasks Made Easy
- Preparing a task
- Setting up a cron job
- Capturing errors and problems
- Sending email notifications
Chapter 3 – Building Your First Web Scraping Application
- Downloading web pages
- Parsing HTML
- Crawling the web
- Subscribing to feeds
- Accessing web APIs
- Interacting with forms
- Using Selenium for advanced interaction
- Accessing password-protected pages
- Speeding up web scraping
Chapter 4 – Searching and Reading Local Files
- Crawling and searching directories
- Reading text files
- Dealing with encodings
- Reading CSV files
- Reading file metadata
- Reading log files
- Reading images
- Reading PDF documents
- Reading Word documents
- Scanning documents for a keyword
Chapter 5 – generating Fantastic Reports
- Creating a simple report in plain text
- Using templates for reports
- Formatting text in Markdown
- Writing a basic Word document
- Styling a Word document
- Generating structure in Word documents
- Adding pictures to Word documents
- Writing a simple PDF document
- Structuring a PDF
- Aggregating PDF reports
- Watermarking and encrypting a PDF
Chapter 6 – Fun with Spreadsheets
- Writing a CSV spreadsheet
- Updating CSV files
- Reading an Excel spreadsheet
- Updating an Excel spreadsheet
- Creating new sheets in an Excel spreadsheet
- Creating charts in Excel
- Working with cell formats in Excel
Chapter 7 – Cleaning and Processing Data
- Preparing a CSV spreadsheet
- Appending currency based on location
- Standardizing the date format
- Aggregating results
- Processing data in parallel
- Processing data with pandas
Chapter 8 – Developing Stunning Graphs
- Plotting a simple sales graph
- Drawing stacked bars
- Plotting pie charts
- Displaying multiple lines
- Drawing a scatter plot
- Visualizing maps
- Adding legends and annotations
- Combining graphs
- Saving charts
Programme scope, delivery arrangements and suitability are confirmed during enquiry.