4 amazing things you can do with Python
The python language is a high-level language created in 1991. Despite being a relatively language, its simple syntax and strong community has made it one of the 10 most widely used languages in the world.
I am passionate about automation. Even though the work is sometimes not worth much for the time spent. The learning path is always very rewarding.
In this article I will show you some automations that you can do to make your day easier. You don’t have to be an experienced programmer to write code with python. With a little programming, you can do amazing things.
Lets check it!
1. Read PDF Documents
A few years ago, I was an intern at a retail company. I needed to crop photos from a pdf document to upload to a server. It was a boring task that took considerable time.
I made a python script to extract these photos. Quick and dirty. I managed to save about 30 minutes of my day that would be spent performing that task.
There are several libraries that interact with pdfs like pypdf2, pdfreader. They are relatively simple to use.
The documentation may seem a little out of date, but they are straightforward and clear. I recommend you take a look. After all, who has never had to extract information from a pdf to generate a report? Let python do that for you.
2. Manipulate spreadsheets
Imagine. It is a Friday, almost the end of the day. You want to do that happy hour with your friends. With a few hours left to finish the job, your boss asks you to do that spreadsheet.
You could work directly with excel to build it. However, depending on the number of data you have to query, it is an exhausting and tedious task. Why not use python to populate the spreadsheet?
The openpyxl library can handle this task easily. I’ve used it before and it’s amazing the amount of resources you can manipulate in your spreadsheet.
3. Read websites information
Bots looking for page information are very common today. They are called crawlers. Python relies on selenium which is, in short, a bot that opens your browser and interacts with the page.
You can do just about anything through this bot. Fill out a form, press buttons, read images, extract a table. Whatever you imagine, it does. And it does well. You will need in addition to python knowledge, html knowledge to be able to extract the information correctly.
I have already used it to read stock information on the stock exchange, information about my college, fill out documents, interact with social media. The use goes of your creativity. I highly recommend it.
4. Plot Graphs
Python has an impressive graphics library called matploblib. Data scientists practically love him. No more plots using excel. Do it more automatically. It’s more fun.
It has several types of graphics that you can plot and build them the way you want. It is great for writing reports. It is worth taking a look.
Did you like it? I plan to publish an article explaining each one I mentioned during the text. Comment on the cool things you have done with python!
Happy coding :D!
