/tags/automation/Recent content in Automation on Asadbek KurbonovHugoen-usFri, 21 Nov 2025 23:42:51 +0100/posts/convert-to-pdf-with-libreoffice/Fri, 21 Nov 2025 23:42:51 +0100/posts/convert-to-pdf-with-libreoffice/<h2 id="the-problem">The Problem</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>I used LibreOffice&rsquo;s CLI utility <code>convert-to</code> in headless mode to convert the files. The conversion worked, but the result was unusable:</p>/posts/apps-script/Tue, 22 Jul 2025 22:39:19 +0500/posts/apps-script/<p>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.</p> <h2 id="first-encounter">First encounter</h2> <p>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&rsquo;t finished it, so I picked it up and rebuilt the bot in Python with <a href="https://docs.aiogram.dev/">aiogram</a>, rendering <code>.docx</code> files from templates using <a href="https://docxtpl.readthedocs.io/">docxtpl</a> and passing files around as base64. Apps Script was only incidental to that project, but it was my first look at the platform.</p>