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Top 5 Python Libraries for Automating Tasks in Any Small Business
Running an online tuition business means planning, implementing and maintaining lots of little repetitive tasks such as scheduling lessons, tracking payments and organising student records. Doing this manually step by step can be tedious, time consuming and prone to error, all three of which can lead to the biggest reason for businesses failing: destroyed motivation.
Python can be used to automate many of these tasks, making workflows more efficient. This is true not just for tutors but for professionals of many types such as small business owners, office workers and freelancers. Whether it's doing the same 20-step process to an Excel spreadsheet, sending out that same email to clients but just changing the name, or scarping data from websites for a valuable dataset.
Different Python libraries are useful for different types of tasks.
1. Pandas - Perfect For Your Data Handling Needs
Great for handling large amounts of structured data, writing the several individual steps for a data transformation.
Examples:
Filtering invoices to find unpaid clients
Analysing monthly sales from Excel sheets
Tracking student attendance automatically
2. OpenPyXL - Your Excel-Focused Toolkit
Made for modifying and generating Excel files, similar to Pandas but with special attention to Excel.
Examples:
Updating property listings in Excel
Generating automated client reports
Preparing financial summaries
3. smtplib - Your Code-able Mailman
Letting you automate sending emails and notifications, the most horrible of repetitive tasks.
Examples:
Sending interview reminders
Emailing promotions to customers
Automatically following up with clients
4. Selenium - Web-Surfing Robot
Automate any repetitive web browsing by coding the clicking and typing needed to go to a specific page or retrieve specific information from a website.
Examples:
Extracting competitor prices from a website
Automatically applying for jobs on multiple platforms
Filling out online forms quickly
5. PyPDF2 - For Those Pesky PDFs
Great for reading and editing PDFs, we all know how frustrating they can be.
Examples:
Extracting key sections from contracts
Merging multiple research papers
Automatically pulling data from invoices
Conclusion
These five Python libraries can help with small repetitive tasks for any professional, saving you time, effort and risk of error. Try building something yourself even if it's small.