13 ways of Excel automation to avoid repeating tasks in Microsoft Excel

More than a year ago , I began to learn when I was a data analyst Python. The company I worked for at that time was all about Excel Of . Every month I have to clean up and merge the nearly collected data from all over the world 100 A different file —— As you can imagine , It's a nightmare ！ Due to the nature of the customer , It's an old story , That is, the turnaround time of delivery analysis is very urgent , Cause the pressure bottleneck to appear again .

first , I use VBA From some of my monthly work , But I found that if the data set format is slightly different every month , It will become quite rigid . I also met Excel The serious problem of collapse , Especially with the growth of data . And then I found out Python, It really changed my life ！ When some file formats are different , I can easily update and modify my Python Script . No more files crashed and lost my work .

1. Import Excel And make sure the date is the date time object

First , You need to Excel File read in Pandas Data frame . One of the problems I encountered when I first used data frames was using dates . When I understand datetime Type , This turns on formatting 、 Possibility of date calculation and so on .

pd.read_excel(file_path, parse_dates=['date_col1', 'date_col2']

Actual test data
Date test data ：02date.zip

ndate = pd.read_excel(" date .xlsx",parse_dates=[' Date of birth ',' Sampling time ',' Registration time '])

here ,file_path It's what you need to clean up Excel The location of the file , And file name and file extension . take datecol1 And replace datecol2 Column names with dates — You can always add or remove more content from the list , Or delete the second