
Enterprise
Automation with
Python
Automate Excel, Web, Documents,
Emails, and Various Workloads with
Easy-to-code Python Scripts
Ambuj Agrawal
www.bpbonline.com
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ISBN 978-93-55511-379
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
Dedicated to
My beloved Parents:
Anil Agrawal & Saroj Agrawal
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About the Author
l Ambuj Agrawal is an industry expert in Artificial Intelligence
and Enterprise Automation. He has received numerous
innovation awards from Citibank, Imperial College London,
Ministry of Justice UK, Bristol University, among others. He is
also one of the youngest recipients of the "Exceptional Talent
Visa in Digital Technology" by the UK Government for expertise
in Compiler Design and Machine Learning.
He has been one of the youngest Speakers at the Money2020
Europe, Fin.Techsummit Europe, Future of Work Summit
London and Automation Summit Paris on the topic “Automation
and Future of Work”.
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About the Reviewer
v Akanksha Sinha is an Architect in Intelligent Process
Automation team with 8 years of Automation experience out of
her 15 years of journey in various progressive roles of Software
Development in Cognizant. She is extensively involved in digital
transformation of client's landscapes through automations
in domains of Digital Marketing and Technology. Her area of
work revolves in exploring automation potential, identifying
automation use cases,solutioning and developing a suite of
bots along with her team in close collaboration of multiple
client stakeholders and eventually providing digital experience
to her clients through a suite of automation solutions.
She has worked with clients like Google, Twitter and Hartford
Life. Her skills are in Javascript, Google Apps Script, Google
Cloud, web development, Unix, NLP, Python, Chatbots, Open
Source RPA. Open Source RPAs and NLP are her areas of
interest where she has worked on several prototypes.
She was one of the founding members of the Tools & Automation
team in Cognizant for Operation Teams working for Tech giants.
She is Google Cloud certified associate and Kore.AI certified
Virtual Assistant developer.
She has a B.E in E&E from RTM Nagpur University, and is
working with Cognizant.
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Acknowledgement
m First and foremost, I would like to thank my parents who
continuously encouraged me to write this book — I could have
never completed this book without their support.
I would also like to thank my family and friends who provided
me with the continued support during my writing of this book.
I am also grateful to the team at BPB Publications, who provided
me the opportunity to publish this book and for providing
valuable feedback throughout the process of writing this book.
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Preface
This book takes the reader through different examples and code
samples to automate repetitive work tasks. This book also gives
solutions to common automation requirements and repetitive tasks
faced during the day to day work environment. After reading this
book you will be able to create automations for business processes
using Python. You will also be able to identify the most common
business process for automation.
This book will equip you with the knowledge of creating, reading,
modifying and extract data from Excel documents using Python
programs. You will also be able to extract data from websites, PDF
documents and send and read messages using Gmail, Outlook
and WhatsApp. This book will help readers to create automations
to automate their boring work and increase the efficiency of their
organizations by 500%.
This book is divided into 11 chapters. The details are listed below.
In Chapter 1, you will be introduced to the installation steps and
setting up the development environment for Python. We will also
cover the installation of Python packages and libraries required for
building automations.
In Chapter 2, you will be introduced to the installation steps and
setting up the development environment for Python. We will also
cover the installation of Python packages and libraries required for
building automations.
In Chapter 3, we will discuss the mindset needed to be successful in
implementation of automations within your organizations. We will
go through the process of identifying and prioritizing automation
opportunities. We will also discuss the ways to share the developed
automations with the wider organization once they are created.
In Chapter 4, we will discuss ways to automate Excel workflows
including creating, writing, and updating the Excel documents. We
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will also discuss the data manipulation techniques with Excel and
CSV documents.
In Chapter 5, we will go through automation for websites and webbased tasks. We will look at how to download data from websites and
automate data extraction from websites by parsing HTML documents.
We will also look at the Selenium framework to automate web actions
such as mouse click and keyboard actions on different websites.
In Chapter 6, we will look at various file-based automations for
different file types in Python. We will discuss some of the Python
libraries that are used to automate different file types. We will
also look at ways to extract data from PDF documents and Word
documents type file structure.
In Chapter 7, we would learn to automate email-based tasks using
Gmail, Outlook and other SMTP clients. We will also look at Text
message and WhatsApp automation using the Twilio API.
In Chapter 8, we would learn to automate Graphical User Interface
(GUI) by controlling the Keyboard and Mouse Actions. We will be
using the Python library PyAutoGUI which works with Windows,
Mac and Linux and provides automations for GUI elements within
the application.
In Chapter 9, we will look at computer Image fundamentals and
the Pillow Python library for manipulating images. We would also
look at the Tesseract library which can be used to extract text within
images and scanned documents.
In Chapter 10, we will look at scheduling automations using
dates and timers. We would also look at external applications that
can allow us to run automations based on certain events such as
receiving a new email or during the start of an application.
In Chapter 11, we will look at methods to extend your Python
scripting knowledge and develop complex end to end process
automations based on your requirements. We will learn how to
work with external libraries and use external code to build these
automations. We would also look at creating Python web services
and using Machine Learning for automation.
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Code Bundle and Coloured Images
Please follow the link to download the
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https://github.com/bpbpublications/Enterprise-Automation-withPython. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the
existing GitHub repository.
We have code bundles from our rich catalogue of books and videos
available at https://github.com/bpbpublications. Check them out!
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Table of Contents
1. Setting Up the Automation Environment.................................... 1
Introduction.................................................................................. 1
Structure........................................................................................ 1
Objectives...................................................................................... 1
Installing and getting started with Mu for Python 3.............. 2
Start Mu......................................................................................... 2
Installing third party packages with Mu.................................. 4
Conclusion.................................................................................... 5
Further reading............................................................................ 5
Questions...................................................................................... 6
2. Fundamentals of Python.................................................................. 7
Introduction.................................................................................. 7
Structure........................................................................................ 7
Objectives...................................................................................... 8
Introduction to Python................................................................ 8
Decision statements....................................................................11
if statement............................................................................ 11
if-else...................................................................................... 12
if-elif-else................................................................................ 12
Loops/repetition........................................................................ 13
The for loop............................................................................ 13
while loops.............................................................................. 14
The break statement............................................................... 15
The continue statement.......................................................... 16
Data structures........................................................................... 16
Lists........................................................................................ 16
Tuples..................................................................................... 18
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Dictionaries............................................................................ 18
Sets......................................................................................... 20
Functions..................................................................................... 20
Libraries, modules, or packages.............................................. 21
Conclusion.................................................................................. 22
Further reading.......................................................................... 23
Questions.................................................................................... 23
3. Automation Mindset – Python as a Tool for Automation....... 25
Introduction................................................................................ 25
Structure...................................................................................... 25
Objectives.................................................................................... 25
Mindset for automation............................................................ 26
Common processes for automation........................................ 26
Identifying business processes................................................ 28
Conclusion.................................................................................. 30
Further reading.......................................................................... 31
Questions.................................................................................... 31
4. Automating Excel-Based Tasks..................................................... 33
Introduction................................................................................ 33
Structure...................................................................................... 33
Objectives.................................................................................... 34
Installing the library to read/write Excel.............................. 34
Creating Excel documents........................................................ 36
Reading Excel documents........................................................ 37
Updating a workbook............................................................... 40
A sample of Excel-based automation...................................... 41
CSV file automations................................................................. 43
Conclusion.................................................................................. 45
Further reading.......................................................................... 45
Questions.................................................................................... 46
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5. Automating Web-Based Tasks...................................................... 47
Introduction................................................................................ 47
Structure...................................................................................... 47
Objectives.................................................................................... 48
Downloading files from the Internet...................................... 48
Introduction to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.......................... 52
HTML.......................................................................................52
CSS............................................................................................55
JavaScript..................................................................................55
Extracting data from websites................................................. 56
Controlling the browser with Selenium................................. 61
Conclusion.................................................................................. 69
Further reading.......................................................................... 69
Questions.................................................................................... 70
6. Automating File-Based Tasks....................................................... 71
Introduction................................................................................ 71
Structure...................................................................................... 71
Objectives.................................................................................... 72
Reading and writing files......................................................... 72
PDF documents automation.................................................... 74
Word documents automation.................................................. 80
Convert a PDF to a Word document....................................... 83
Conclusion.................................................................................. 85
Further reading.......................................................................... 85
Questions.................................................................................... 85
7. Automating Email, Messenger Applications, and
Messages........................................................................................... 87
Introduction................................................................................ 87
Structure...................................................................................... 87
Objectives.................................................................................... 87
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Simple Mail Transfer Protocol................................................. 88
Sending emails using Gmail.................................................... 89
Outlook email automation....................................................... 93
Text and WhatsApp message automation............................. 94
Conclusion.................................................................................. 99
Further reading.......................................................................... 99
Questions.................................................................................. 100
8. GUI – Keyboard and Mouse Automation............................... 101
Introduction.............................................................................. 101
Structure.................................................................................... 101
Objectives.................................................................................. 102
Introduction to the PyAutoGUI module.............................. 102
Controlling mouse actions...................................................... 104
Controlling keyboard actions................................................. 107
Automation using screenshots...............................................110
Conclusion.................................................................................112
Further reading.........................................................................113
Questions...................................................................................113
9. Image Based Automations........................................................... 115
Introduction...............................................................................115
Structure.....................................................................................115
Objectives...................................................................................115
Computer image fundamentals..............................................116
Pillow for image manipulation.............................................117
Extracting text from images using OCR............................... 120
Conclusion................................................................................ 125
Further reading........................................................................ 125
Questions.................................................................................. 125
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10. Creating Time and Event - Based Automations...................... 127
Introduction.............................................................................. 127
Structure.................................................................................... 127
Objectives.................................................................................. 127
Scheduling automation........................................................... 128
Writing timer programs.................................................................132
Launching programs from Python.................................................135
Using external tools for triggers.....................................................136
Conclusion................................................................................ 137
Further reading........................................................................ 137
Questions.................................................................................. 138
11. Writing Complex Automations................................................... 139
Introduction.............................................................................. 139
Structure.................................................................................... 139
Objectives.................................................................................. 140
Creating APIs with Python.................................................... 140
Combining multiple automation scripts.............................. 147
Finding solutions online......................................................... 148
Using machine learning for automation.............................. 150
Conclusion................................................................................ 153
Further reading........................................................................ 153
Questions.................................................................................. 154
Index......................................................................................... 155-159
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Setting Up the Automation Environment
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1
Chapter 1
Setting Up the
Automation
Environment
Introduction
In this chapter, you will be introduced to the installation steps and
setting up the development environment for Python. We will also
cover the installation of Python packages and libraries required for
building automations.
Structure
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
•
Installing and getting started with Mu for Python 3
•
Installing third party packages with Mu
Objectives
After studying this chapter, you will be able to set the automation
environment on your machine. You will also get an understanding
of Python development environments and be able to run Python on
your machine.
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Enterprise Automation with Python
Installing and getting started with
Mu for Python 3
The code with Mu is a simple Python editor for beginner
programmers. Download Mu installer from https://codewith.mu/
en/download. Find the installer you just downloaded (it’s probably
in your Downloads folder). Double click on the installer to run it. If
you get any warning while installing, accept those warnings and run
the installer. Once the installation has completed successfully, click
on Finish to close the installer.
Start Mu
You can start Mu by clicking on the icon in the Start menu or by
typing Mu in the Search box. The first run will take a bit of time, and it
will install and load all the required modules. Once you have started
Mu, the code editor will look as shown in the following figure:
Figure 1.1: Mu code editor
The button bar in Mu contains buttons for creating and running the
Python code along with the help instructions:
Figure 1.2: Mu code editor toolbar