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I did this when I started my first full time role out of college with great success. I was responsible for tons of reports that were manual and tedious. My go

I did this when I started my first full time role out of college with great success. I was responsible for tons of reports that were manual and tedious. My goal was to improve something about the process every time I did the report. It could be as little as making the label I looked for bold, or as big as refactoring and automating the entire thing. In the same way, I made standard work improvements. That turned ~4 hrs/day of reports into an automated system, gave me a good understanding of how the various systems and reports work together, and helped me get my first promotion. I've moved on to a new role where I'm doing the same thing on a process which has been void of substantial improvements for 3+ years. There's always something, and I can remove a bit more time with every automation iteration.

danso 7y ago
When I was working in academia, early on I decided I would finally buckle down and learn proper devops and scripting (e.g. how to do things at the command-line) and had the luxury of having all the time I wanted to bikeshed on automating the collation process (never did master Make syntax though!). The csvkit toolset – particularly `in2csv` [0] and `csvsql`, which, respectively, can be used to extract CSV from Excel sheets and import/insert directly into sqlite – make frequent appearances in my daily work these days. Though admittedly, I don't know what options there are to distangle spreadsheets that aren't just data (e.g. intertwined formulas). [0] https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/scripts/in2csv.html https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/scripts/in2csv.html [1] https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/scripts/csvsql.html https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/scripts/csvsql.html