Introduction

Microsoft Excel is everywhere in office work. The repeated work on worksheets is pretty tedious.

This instruction will help an office worker to use Python to automate some repeated office work and boost work productivity. This instruction requires basic programming knowledge to understand every step.

Scenario Example

Let’s imagine you work as an office clerk at Walmart’s whole sales department. Your company is responsible to distribute a hundred thousand items from warehouses to all stores across North America. Your company needs some data to know the sales trend for each item.

One of your daily tasks is to write a summary to your boss. However, the Excel sheet you received from coworkers has one hundred thousand rows, and each row has twenty columns. Your boss told you only a few columns are needed in the report. The following table(Click to see in a new tab) shows the difficulty level of the repeated task.

Let’s suppose you are going to select columns Units, UnitCosts, and Total from the original sheet and generate a new Excel file, and you’ll send that file to your boss.

Basic Data Types

Excel works with data, and the data could be numbers such as 1, 2, 3, or a word like hello. The numbers 1, 2, 3 in Python are called Numeric Type.The word “hello” refers to Data Type String. You can’t add a Numeric Type with a String.

OS & Software

Mac OSCatalina 10.15
Excel 2016.35
Python 3.7
pip: a software for installing some helper libraries for your python program.
pandas: first helper library
xlrd: second helper library
openpyxl: thrid helper library

Time Estimate

It might takes two hours for people with little programming experiences to fully understand the whole process.

Steps

Typographical Conventions

Convention	Typeface	Example
Terminal commands	`abc`	`cd`
Key terms	*italic*	*data type*
Excel Cells	Value	Costs

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Conclusion

The powerful Python libraries enable the programming language to become the most suitable tool for simple office work automation. Once you grasp the basic idea of programming in Python, you will notice how amazing it is to let your computer work for you.

Install Python and Pycharm

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