Automation

The Problem While working on a freelance project, I needed to generate PDF reports from Excel files. The challenge? The Excel files were wide and long. Here we see a sample Excel file around 15 columns containing employee data like ID, name, email, department, job title, hire date, salary, and more. I used LibreOffice’s CLI utility convert-to in headless mode to convert the files. The conversion worked, but the result was unusable: ...

Google Apps Script is easy to dismiss as a toy. Over two freelance projects it turned out to be a genuinely capable serverless platform for automation work built around Google Sheets and Telegram. This post covers the second of those projects — a reporting system for a US-market logistics business — and how I got there. First encounter I came across Apps Script on an earlier freelance job. A consulting firm needed a Telegram bot that generated templated Word contracts. They had started the work themselves in Apps Script but hadn’t finished it, so I picked it up and rebuilt the bot in Python with aiogram, rendering .docx files from templates using docxtpl and passing files around as base64. Apps Script was only incidental to that project, but it was my first look at the platform. ...