Home Posts tagged "automation" (Page 9)

Tag: automation

Easily update Excel graphs; AutoHotKey saved me 100’s of repetitive clicks

Easily update Excel graphs

Easily update Excel graphs

In market research I used to spend a lot of time making sure my charts and graphs were beautiful visualizations that conveyed the data in an easy to understandable way.

I always wanted to make complete use of the range of the graph and would have to, manually, update each one.  I finally learned some object oriented programming and wrote an script in AutoHotKey to easily change the axis on scales in and easily update Excel graphs.  The below video demonstrates how I can just hit a key combo and scroll up/down to adjust the scale.

Regular Expressions to automate metrics is an investment everyone should do!

regular expressions to automate metrics

Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions to automate metrics

I’ve written a script that logs into our vendor website and exports the recent email campaigns then breaks them out by region, campaign type, Business Unit, etc. and links them back to our SharePoint site for more information.  The script relies on a regular expression to automate metrics on our long string name and parse-out sections by examining patterns in the Naming convention.

My script first logs into our tool (SilverPop) and performs web scraping to capture the data and dumps it to a local HTML file.  I then use Excel to import the HTML file and start parsing the naming convention with the regular expression.   After all the columns are created I replace some of the short abbreviations with longer, easier to understand, words.   Then I insert functions aggregating the metrics by Type of campaign, Region, Language etc.   After that I break out four regions.  All in all it takes about 10 minutes to run but saves me about 40 hours worth of work.  The below video demonstrates the regular expressions to automate metrics in action

When your IT department fails you Web Scraping with AutoHotkey can save the day!

web scraping with AutoHotkey

One of my clients has over 3,000 videos on their website.  Amazingly nobody in their IT department can provide a holistic file with metadata like: Title, # of views, Length, Format, Tags, etc.  How crazy is that?   After contacting their video hosting company, nobody could (would) share this information!

Web Scraping with AutoHotkey to the rescue!

I wrote web scraping with AutoHotKey script that first got a list of all the videos, then looped over them and extracted various attributes about each video.  Not an ideal way to get this, but the client was manually going to go through this by cutting & pasting from their browse.