Automate Office Tasks with Python

Forty-eight pages of Python scripts, each one solving a specific problem that most people currently do by hand. Renaming four hundred files so they sort properly. Pulling every row out of a spreadsheet that matches a condition. Downloading a number from a web page every morning without opening a browser.

None of it requires prior programming experience. The book assumes you have a computer, an internet connection, and a task you are tired of doing manually. It does not assume you know what a variable is. That gets covered early, in two short chapters, and nothing after that point requires you to remember much from a computer science class you did not take.

The gap between knowing no programming and writing a useful script is about three evenings. The gap between writing a useful script and building software is a career. This book lives entirely in the first gap.

A script is a file that does one thing. It runs, it finishes, and it does not need to be maintained by a team. The ones in this book range from a handful of lines to a few dozen. Most of them solve problems that take a human between ten minutes and two hours and take the script under five seconds.

That ratio is the entire argument. Not that programming is beautiful or that everyone should learn it, but that certain tasks are so repetitive and so mechanical that handing them to a machine is an obvious trade.

The book is organised around projects rather than concepts. Each chapter starts with a real problem, not a contrived exercise, and ends with a script you can run on your own files.

Chapter three builds a file organiser that sorts a cluttered Downloads folder by type. Chapter five writes a script that reads an Excel file, filters rows by a condition, and writes the results to a new file. Chapter seven pulls a price from a public web page and logs it to a spreadsheet; chapter eight puts that on a schedule you set once.

Every script is printed in full. There is no 'left as an exercise for the reader' anywhere in this book.

This is not an introduction to software engineering. There are no classes, no web frameworks, no databases, and no deployment pipelines. If a chapter starts feeling like a computer science lecture, something has gone wrong.

There is also no attempt at completeness. Python has hundreds of libraries. This book uses nine of them, chosen because they solve the problems in front of you without requiring three hours of setup first.

The book is a PDF and EPUB, delivered instantly as a single download. Read the PDF on one screen while you type into another, or the EPUB on a Kindle, Kobo or phone. Buyers get every future revision at no extra cost, delivered through the same download link.

Refunds are handled by the checkout platform and do not require a reason. If the book does not help, ask for one. A refund costs less than a PDF gathering dust in a folder you never open.