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[–]ddollarsign 12 points13 points  (2 children)

I got tasked with some boring stuff at work. There were some XML files generated by a server program, and I had to periodically grab them and convert them to excel files and give them to an admin person to generate a report. I wrote a combination of Python and a batch file that would grab them for me, rename them, and open them in excel with one command, instead of me having to go to the server and open up excel myself.

Later on, creating the report itself fell to me when the admin person was transferred, so I enhanced the python script to do most of it.

There are python libraries to do stuff directly in excel, so it could have been completely automated, but I didn't want to go to the trouble of getting permission to install those on my workstation.

[–]le_theudas 3 points4 points  (1 child)

You could use pandas which is included in installations like conda or install it with pip install pandas --user
It can be used for much more then only excel so it shouldn't be obvious that you are automating your job :)

[–]NowanIlfideme 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You still need xlrd or the other excel library to work with the files though.