Python Automation For Dummies

Chapter 8

Automating the Office

IN THIS CHAPTER

Automating Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel

Creating, opening, and watermarking PDFs

In this chapter, you automate common office apps and tasks, particularly Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and PDFs. You find techniques for creating new files, opening existing files, and adding content to files. I also show you a script that can add a watermark image to every page of a PDF.

Automating Microsoft Word

You can create, open, add content to, and save Word documents with Python. If you find yourself doing any of those tasks repetitively, you’ll appreciate the first script in this chapter, which does all those things.

For our first script, we’ll use the python-docx module to create, open, add content to, and save a Word document. In the code, you’ll see a line that reads from docx import Document, but that’s a little misleading. The actual name of the module is python-docx. To use this script, make sure you activate your virtual environment and enter the following command in the Terminal:

pip install python-docx

Here’s the script in its entirety:

# create_open_word.py# You must pip install python-docx.from docx import Documentfrom pathlib import Pathimport osimport sys# Here is where you define what you want to put into the document. ...