I'll run down the list of automation I did, hopefully to give you some ideas. Least complex, to complex.
>Kill program, launch program, and press OK. We have a program that crashes often. This quickly kills it(which otherwise requires clicking out of error messages). Then reopens and clicks OK which starts a long boot process.
>Copy, paste, delay, down. Repeat. A slow system could not handle mass copy paste. This was a solution.
>Open PDF file, sign document. Repeat for all docs in a folder. This was nice because after I checked the document in English, I could sign off in all the languages without having to resign manually.
>Showing every permutation of a part based on rules. And presenting it in common english rather than &A78&F48
>Screenshot approver page- This got a bit harder. Using keyboard shortcuts + looking for images to jump through an Application to a final screen. Then Screenshot each approver page. The next bullet is a much better solution
>Send email/open IM/or open Work Order. We have an excel file that has 1 approver, and I scrapped that into a sqlite database. With that I could create a sample email with tons of relevant information. Outlook had the email, subject, and body filled in. I would edit before sending. This is otherwise a 5-10 minute process. Doing this on 10 Work Orders per day was extremely time consuming. I made a production version that could select Email, Instant Message, or open Work Order.
>Everything about a part- Similar scraping, but using an online table instead of Excel. Put it in sqlite, I automated opening up drawings, automated finding different colors and their part numbers, opening up relevant work orders, etc...
Some notes on all of this- Sqlite might have been overkill, but these were 100 column and 5000+ row queries. I knew sql, so I used it.
Upgrading to Windows 10 killed my production app. I never got it fixed(I was a General Motors sacrifice + I was busy after the upgrade with my job)
These were the ones I'd use daily.
I would also write scripts for one-off tasks.
Hope that gives you some ideas!
