<story><title>Automating Microsoft Office with Python</title><url>http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/sanand0/ipython-notebooks/master/Office.ipynb</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>unlimitedbacon</author><text>Years ago, at my first internship, we were assigned to copy fields of information out of hundreds of PDF files and compile them into a single spreadsheet. While my coworker began dutifully trudging away, I started googling and found out about the COM API and the Python library. I spent the rest of my time writing a script to automate the task.&lt;p&gt;The silly and wonderful thing about the Office API is that it doesn&amp;#x27;t work silently, but instead performs the operations on screen as if they were being done by a human being. The article explains this. There&amp;#x27;s something very satisfying about seeing the reaction of your boss as he watches the computer do the work on its own, as if its being operated by a ghost. Now I know what it must have been like to see a player piano a hundred years ago.</text></comment>
<story><title>Automating Microsoft Office with Python</title><url>http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/sanand0/ipython-notebooks/master/Office.ipynb</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bryogenic</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d be really interested in this if there were a way to get Python to render a ppt into a pdf.  Basically, the goal would be to programmatically add a unique watermark to each ppt, render the pdf, and save it.  Doing this for 100+ things is not worth the time but if Python can script it up it might be worth investigating.  Looks like I need to go read the COM api a bit.</text></comment>