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cjet79  1mo ago (text post)   2718 thread views

Maker's Monday

Trying out a new weekly thread idea.

This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.

@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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I'm trying to help a friend automate a data entry task: read a row from Excel, and paste some subset of the entries into appropriate text boxes on a website in Chrome. My friend is not within driving distance, and I'd like to do it with a minimum amount of installations on his computer.

I'm most comfortable with Python. The first portion of the task can be handled straightforwardly with the Pandas package. Is Selenium the best way to handle the output?

If you have to paste it on a website, doesn't a browser extension that reads from the clipboard and does the rest make more sense? Or a function he can copy-paste into the dev console, if you really want to minimize installations.

I did not know that such browser extensions exist and will have to look into it. Similarly, no idea about the dev console, but he's on a work computer without admin privileges - any installations have to go through IT.

The dev console is built into all major browsers and needs no special permissions. Press F12, and it will pop up.

As for extensions, I meant writing your own. I had a quick look to see if you can get access to the clipboard from them, and the multiple clipboard history extensions that are available would imply that it should work. Once you have the data in the clipboard you'd need some javascript to select the right elements and paste the values into them, it should be pretty easy.

I think if the IT dept is extremely anal, they might prevent installation of extensions, but there's a good chance they left it open. You'd need to get it published in the Chrome Store though (there's a way to put the browser in "developer mode" and install anything you want, but that might get him screamed at by IT as well)

Thanks for the ideas and the clarification!

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