What's inside
What is Task Automation?
Let’s start simple - what is Task Automation?
The definition stands that task automation is the application of modern technology that is supposed to minimize and eventually eliminate human involvement in some processes to complete the task.
Task automation ideas are to be found at every step of our daily life, which is how it should be in today’s modern world.
Examples:
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airport check-in kiosks (touch-screen device that allows the passenger to do self-check-in at the airport; it provides a valid boarding card and saves passengers time)
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chatbots (support chatbots are available now on almost every website to answer user questions or guide him through a process; there are chatbots that we can use at home to turn the lights on and off etc. automatically; if you have a smartphone you can use a chatbot created to be a personal assistant like, e.g., Siri and Alexa)
Now the question is “Can I use Python to automate tasks?”.
Of course, you can; the best part is that no one can stop you. All you need to start is to install Python and the appropriate set of libraries on your machine.
Python in task automation - use cases
Python is an excellent choice for many different things, and task automation is also one of them. Not to mention that when comparing Python with other programming languages, it is always the simplest one.
An interesting fact is that you can work on automatizing your repetitive tasks even if you are a complete freshman and need to learn more about programming. You need to come up with the job you’d like to automate. When you get this - it is time to choose the right tool. We strongly recommend Python to do that!
The great thing about Python is that you can automate almost everything using this language. With a little bit of effort, you can automate any repetitive task you can think of.
How to automate your work with Excel?
If you work with Excel, you probably know how to make your life easy with Excel formulas, pivot tables, charts, etc.
But do you know that you can make your life even easier? Thanks to openpyxl and Pandas. Or, since these two might get complicated and take some time to master, you can install a Python library named mitosheet (also known as Mito).
Mito’ll let you group data and calculate the summary stats using an interface similar to Excel. Also, Mito generates the code for each edit.
To automate, for example, pivot tables (and more Excel-related tasks), you need to install it, open a new terminal (or command prompt) and then download the Mito installer:
python -m pip install mitoinstaller
The next step:
python -m mitoinstaller install
And that’s it. You are all set and ready to automate your Excel tasks!
How to automate Web Scraping?
Web Scraping is a typical way to extricate a lot of information from sites and web applications. Python is a go-to language when it comes to doing that. The most popular Python libraries for web scraping are Requests, Beautiful Soup 4, Ixml, Selenium, and Scrapy.
But we’ll focus on automating web scraping with the AutoScraper library created to make web scraping smart, fast, and easy. To get started, you need to type a few lines of code, and you are done.
You can do this in five easy steps:
1. Installation There are three ways to install the AutoScraper on your machine:
- from the git repo using pip
pip install git+https://github.com/alirezamika/autoscraper.git
- using PyPi
pip install autoscraper
- from source
python setup.py install
2. Import the library
from autoscraper import AutoScraper
3. Define the web scraping function To do that, you have to start by providing the URL or HTML content of the web page from which you’d like to scrap the data.
4. Initiate the AutoScraper
After you initiate the URL and wanted list, you have to prepare the AutoScraper function. You need it to build the scraper model, which can be done using the code:
scraper = AutoScraper ()
5. Building the object and saving the model
We are coming to an end, and building the object and saving the model is the final step in web scraping using AutoScraper. By saving the model you’ve built, you can reload it whenever you need.
Besides the above, you can automate:
- Posting on social media accounts.
- Sending e-mail marketing campaigns.
- eCommerce-related tasks - product recommendation, inventory management, and purchase recommendation.
- Analyzing data like generating reports with data analysis using Python tools like Pandas and NumPy.
- Merging documents and extracting content from them using pyautogui, PyPDF2, and pdfminer.
- and more…
These task examples are relatively simple but can work as a base if you want to build something more advanced.
Conclusion
AI, and robotics can (and eventually will) improve everything we do in our personal lives and business. Innovative technologies fueled by the mentioned AI, robotics, and support are helping everybody to automate all business processes and functions.
If you use the right tools, the benefits your business will experience are priceless. For example:
increasing:
- human resource availability
- focus on high-value activities
- productivity
improving:
- reliability
- performance
- accuracy
reducing costs
You may realize by now that there are plenty of tasks in your daily life that you could easily automate (even without much programming knowledge).
So, remember that there is an option to automate the tedious, repeatable tasks. If we didn’t convince you or you are looking for some more information, we can recommend diving into “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” by Al Sweigart.
You’ll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand - as the author said by himself - no prior programming experience required.
Contact us
At Sunscrapers, we have a team of developers and software engineers with outstanding technical knowledge and experience. We can build your project successfully.
Talk with us about hiring Python and Django developers and work with the best. Sunscrapers can help you make the most out of Python, Django, and other technologies to put your project to the next level.
Contact us at hello@sunscrapers.com