How to Automate Repetitive Office Tasks

How often do you use office programs like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word in your daily tasks?

Regardless of your profession, it’s quite common to use office programs for organizing and analyzing data, creating presentation materials, or writing reports.

However, when manually entering large volumes of data in Excel, or repetitively changing text in a PowerPoint template slide, you might wonder, "Isn't there a more efficient way to do this?"

Automating Repetitive Tasks with Python

Python is an excellent tool for automating such repetitive tasks.

Especially with libraries like openpyxl for Excel, python-pptx for PowerPoint, and python-docx for Word, you can automate repetitive tasks in office programs.

How would you merge multiple Excel files separated by tabs?

Manually opening each file and copying and pasting data is highly inefficient.

But with Python and openpyxl, you can accomplish this with just a few lines of code.

Example Code to Merge 10 Excel Files

# List of Excel files containing sales data from January to June
file_names = ['input_file_1.xlsx', 'input_file_2.xlsx', 'input_file_3.xlsx', 'input_file_4.xlsx', 'input_file_5.xlsx', 
              'input_file_6.xlsx']

# Read and merge data from each file
for idx, file_name in enumerate(file_names, start=1):
    # Load the workbook of each file
    wb = load_workbook(file_name)
    ws = wb.active  # Assume the first sheet
    
    # Create sheet names as "Sheet1", "Sheet2", "Sheet3", etc.
    sheet_name = f"Sheet{idx}"

    # Create a unique sheet for each file
    new_sheet = merged_wb.create_sheet(title=sheet_name)

    # Copy data from each file to the new sheet
    for row in ws.iter_rows(values_only=True):
        new_sheet.append(row)

The example above is a code snippet that automatically reads specific data from Excel files.

With just a few lines of code, you can automate the repetitive task of pulling data from multiple Excel files.

Moreover, by using Python, you can not only extract data but also transform it according to specific conditions or automatically generate reports, among many other tasks.

If you've been spending an unnecessary amount of time on repetitive tasks, you can now complete your work more easily by running a Python script. 👍

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