How To Automate Excel Reporting with Python
We Repeat Many Tasks Involving Excel Reporting
We waste a lot of time typing up reports, crunching numbers, creating pretty graphs, and sharing those results with the people who need them. Excel gives us quite a few tools to acomplish each of these operations effectively, but not always efficiently. That's where Python comes in. Not only would learning python programming make you faster in doing your Excel calculations, it opens the door to being able to do more advanced things on that data later on such as machine learning, predictive calculations, and much more.
If you've never heard of python programming, that's okay. It is a programming language that was litterally built to be easy to learn and use. There's plenty of tutorials on my YouTube channel
about how to pick up python and be programming in under an hour. What makes python so easy to learn? It is written like a natural language instead of a computer language. You don't have to remember any unneccesary code, and all the functions are straight forward. In fact, to begin working with
Excel data, the function is ".read_excel()" Easy right?
This means whenever someone else solves the problem you have, they can transfer their code on places like GitHub and all you have to do is find it and use it.
But Why Python? Why not Automate with VBA?
You may of heard of VBA, you likely have if you're visiting this page. Don't get me wrong, VBA is a great accesory tool to learn how to do. There's nothing Python can do within the realm of the spreadsheet that VBA cannot. However, this is only within the realm of the spreadsheet.
I want to encourage you to look at the trend of how data is now being used.
The numbers on a report about previous performance aren't good enough any more. Today, we use data to make decisions about the future, where to target, which areas to optimize.
I would argue that Python gives you the capability to begin thinking about this advanced insights much more readily than just native Excel VBA. Programming languages live and die by the community using them. The better the community, the more contributions from people, the more problems solved, the better the programming language will be.
The nature of open source creates this.
Unfortunately, you don't see many people creating new revolutionary algorithms in VBA. You always could but why would you if someone has already made all the components in another language such as Python?
How to Start Automating Excel Reporting
- Intro Video on YouTube to get the baseline idea.
- Full Python Intro Course (Under an Hour)
- Automate Excel Pivot Tables
- Search Multiple Excel Files
- Replace Excel Vlookup with Python
- Clean Excel Data using Python
- Combining Excel Sheets using Python
These are just a few videos that can help you get started. I'm always adding more and always looking for suggestions. If you're needing help or get stuck, I do user requested videos all the time. Just let me know!
