Course description

Many jobs at work come round every week: tidying a shared folder, copying figures from one file into another, typing invoice details into a list, emailing the same summary, checking a supplier's prices. Each one only takes half an hour, but together they can eat a morning. If you've learned the basics of Python, you already know enough to start handing those jobs to a script. This course shows you how, safely and step by step.

It's a full course, not a quick tour. There are 10 sections and 52 written lessons, with every piece of code shown in full alongside the real output it produces. You follow the office manager of a small hardware shop in Northumberland (a fictional business) as she automates her Monday morning admin, including the mistakes she made along the way. Every section has sample files, starter and solution scripts, the expected output and a cheat sheet. You practise sending emails and reading a supplier's website with a mail catcher and a practice website that run only on your own computer.

What you'll learn

• Files and folders: finding, copying, moving, renaming, sorting, zipping and backing up files, with dry runs so nothing is lost.
• Text and patterns: regular expressions to pull out dates, codes, prices and invoice numbers, and to rename files consistently.
• Spreadsheets: combining CSV exports and creating formatted Excel workbooks with openpyxl.
• Documents: reading PDF invoices with pypdf and creating Word documents with python-docx.
• Email: building messages with attachments and sending them safely, with passwords kept out of your scripts.
• The web: reading web pages with requests and Beautiful Soup, following the rules, and calling JSON APIs with keys and limits.
• Reliability: command-line options, logging, settings files, error handling and running scripts on a schedule.

The final project

You'll build one script that runs a whole Monday morning routine: a backup, a tidy shared folder, the weekly sales workbook, an invoice list, a supplier price check and a summary email, with a dry-run option, a log and a schedule.

Who this course is for

• Office, operations and admin staff with repetitive computer tasks.
• Small business owners who want their weekly paperwork to run itself.
• Anyone who has finished a beginners' Python course and wants a practical next step.

How the course works

Read each lesson with Python open beside you, run the starter script from the practice pack and check your result against the solution. Everything works on Windows, Mac or Linux with free tools. You keep lifetime access, so you can come back to any lesson when you automate your next task.

What will I learn?

• Spot which everyday tasks are worth automating and set up a safe automation folder with a virtual environment
• Find, copy, move, rename, sort and back up files and folders without overwriting anything
• Use regular expressions to pull dates, codes, prices and invoice numbers out of text and rename files consistently
• Combine CSV exports and create and format Excel workbooks with openpyxl
• Read text from PDF invoices with pypdf and create Word documents such as purchase orders with python-docx
• Build and send emails with attachments safely, keeping passwords out of your scripts
• Read web pages with requests and Beautiful Soup politely, and call JSON APIs with keys, limits and error handling
• Make scripts dependable with command-line options, logging, settings files and a schedule, and build a complete weekly automation

Frequently asked questions