Dear LevelOne forum members,
I will briefly introduce myself and my “predicament”
I am working on a logistics platform in a big european car company that does a lot of international shipping. Those shipped goods need a lot of following up on, and like most billion dollar companies ours basically runs on Excel as well. #SadFace
I speak 5 languages… but none are the programming kind.
My objective is to use extracted data (in Excel format) and paste it in several boxes on a web-based company program (runs in Chrome)
So here is the real question: "what is the best way to do this, taking into account that I have only a user based access level" (so no admin permissions).
I currently do not have any (worth mentioning) programming knowledge (a tiny little bit of VBA) but I am not affraid to learn some.
However I don’t want to learn something completely from scratch that is not going to be useful to the practical stuff I want to do.
(that makes sense right?)
One might wonder why in such a big company a lowly logistics technician needs to figger out new ways to optimize and improve… well the short answer on that question would be “no money for investments of any kind” and the fact that my boss is acting like a 100 year old closed minded grandpa doesn’t help.
So really… any constructive comments from the geniuses (which you are) to push me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Wendell once liked me on Twitter, so be extra nice to this noob!
Thanking you guys in advance for your time and effort.
Stay healthy.
You’d neet root to install tools to build and run your shit, but basically you can do everything with python, so yeah…
But I don’t think you should.
Software development is a rabbit hole and if you pull up your app to do your stuff you might get into trouble if shit fucks up
and believe me, shit fucks up all the time
I don’t know your job (admin guy, middle man, software developer, ux designer), but if they aren’t paying you to do the software you shouldn’t actually do the software without them knowing
I will recommend Python with the Pandas package, but the difficulty depends on the kind of Excel files. From your description, they seem to be generated by the system, in that case, hopefully they are “simple”.
By simple, I mean none of that multiple tables on a single sheet, or tables with strange cell or column groupings, etc. If that’s the case, you should be able to write a simple script that takes the Excel file as input, copies the cells you want into your clipboard, allowing you to simply paste in your web form.
Here are some steps to get you started.
Install Python, you should be able to do this without Administrator privileges.
You should then install Python’s package manager pip.
Some built-in Python modules that could be useful:
argparse useful to accept arguments in your script, but if this is too complicated for you, you can also use sys.argv - essentially it’s a Python list.
pathlib and os.path in case you need to do any path manipulation.
If you don’t know where to start with pandas, the getting started guide (surprise! surprise!) is a good place to start. Just learn the things you feel you need, skip over the rest.
First of all, thank you for replying. It’s appreciated.
So, the basic idea is to run a macro type like code, meaning from a machine perspective it would still be done manually.
My job description isn’t any of the ones you mentioned, I am simply someone who is living in the torture zone of knowing what can be (easily?) automated (most of my colleagues don’t know) without knowing exactly HOW to do it at this time… I am not getting paid specifically for this but I see this as me adding value to the company by trying to be a better profesional. (and maybe get a raise -who knows ^^)
That’s why I posted this thread. Thanks again!
Thank you for replying! I guess, this is how you recognize someone who does programming right?
The first number is 0
I am going to have to check if I can get python installed. We have a restrictive catalogue of applications. We can’t just install any program. That said, I am reasonably sure I can get Visual Studio… so I guess I’m gonna be OK for running Python on that, right?
Either way, I really do appreciate you giving me feedback and detailing the necessary steps on how to approach this problem.
the list provided sums up what I was going to reply, and considering you have little to no programming knowledge (while still doable) this could take some time. You are learning not only how to use a programming language, but also interacting with the web, and data wrangling.
I’ve seen post already on “Oh, download this, then install packages, and use x libraries” If you are not prepared to learn a new langauage all of this is null and void. if you are prepared to do so, Python is absolutely the way to go. As someone who has taught Python, you will have questions, and things are not as “easy” as they seem.
if you can get VS then you can get the python packages you need. You will need to install other packages related to python, so if you have any administrative credentials it could come in handy, since you are probably on a GPO through your organization.
As a thank you for helping me out, I wanted to give you guys an update.
So I have started a 78 chapter video tutorial for learning the basics of python from scratch.
And although I am going slow as I’m pausing a lot whilst following all the steps and taking notes, I am already sure that this is the way to go.
Also there is no rush and I am stubborn enough to see it through.
After that, I am gonna go and revisit this thread and apply one of the proposed solutions.
Good luck, although I would strongly urge to try and experiment with whatever idea you might have while going through the tutorial rather than think “I should finish the tutorial before I try something”. While for many things it is true that people learn more by doing than studying, it is particularly true with programming.
Here’s something to encourage you, if you like the approach I proposed in my earlier response, I expect the script to be around 20-30 lines. Feel free to ask for hints here, I’ll try to respond.
It might be possible to put together an excel formula that generates a javascript snippet that when copy/pasted into a chrome developer console fills out the form on a page you’re seeing.
Depends on how complicated the data in excel is, and how complicated the form is.
Excel has this “text” function that serves like a poor man’s printf, and has “concatenate” that can help put together long urls or scripts. That can be typed into multiple cells for a bit of comfort.
