Book Image

Automate it! - Recipes to upskill your business

By : Chetan Giridhar
Book Image

Automate it! - Recipes to upskill your business

By: Chetan Giridhar

Overview of this book

<p>This book gives you a great selection of recipes to automate your business processes with Python, and provides a platform for you to understand how Python is useful to make time consuming and repetitive business tasks more efficient. Python is a mature high level language, has object-oriented programming features, powers various apps, has a huge set of modules, and great community support. Python is extremely easy to use, can help you get complex tasks done efficiently and is an apt choice for our needs.</p> <p>With a classic problem-solution based approach and real-world examples, you will delve into things that automate your business processes. You will begin by learning about the Python modules to work with Web, Worksheets, Presentations and PDFs. You’ll leverage Python recipes to automate processes in HR, Finance and making them efficient and reliable. For instance, company payroll — an integral process in HR will be automated with Python recipes.</p> <p>A few chapters of this book will also help you gain knowledge on working with bots and computer vision. You will learn how to build bots for automating business use cases by integrating artificial intelligence. You’ll also understand how Python is helpful in face detection and building a scanner of your own. You will see how to effectively and easily use Python code to manage SMS and voice notifications, opening a world of possibilities using cloud telephony to solve your business needs. Moving forward, you will learn to work with APIs, Webhooks and Emails to automate Marketing and Customer Support processes. Finally, using the various Python libraries, this book will arm you with knowledge to customize data solutions and generate reports to meet your business needs.</p> <p>This book will help you up-skill and make your business processes efficient with the various Python recipes covered in this book.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Automate it!
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Reading Excel sheets


As you might be aware, Microsoft office has started providing a new extension to Microsoft Excel sheets, which is .xlsx, from Office 2007. With this change, Excel sheets moved to a XML based file format (Office Open XML) with ZIP compression. Microsoft made this change when the business community asked for an open file format that can help transferring data across applications that pushed them. Let's gets started and see how we can work with Excel sheets using Python!

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use the openpyxl module to read Excel sheets. The openpyxl module is a comprehensive module that performs both read and write operations on Excel sheets. Another alternative to openpyxl is the xlrd module. While xlrd has been good at supporting Excel formats since way back in 1995, the module can only be used to read data from Excel sheets. The openpyxl module helps in performing more operations, such as modifying data, writing data into files, and copying, which are imperative...