Company:

While I was working at the Chicago Department of Public Health, I was asked to go through large Excel Spreadsheets and find new COVID-19 cases. I'm always looking for ways to make my life easier, so when I was asked to perform this same task every week, I tried to think of ways I could automate it. I decided to write a couple python scripts to do just that.

What did I do?

Every week many facilities from around the city would send us Excel sheets with all the cases they were tracking. We had a master tracker spreadsheet that needed to be kept updated. My task was to go through each facility's spreadsheet and add the new cases to the master tracker. After some time, I realized that it would be a perfect candidate for automation.

How did I do it?

This kind of automation is pretty simple, but there was a fair amount of formatting to get around. First, I had to establish the headings of the columns of interest. After that was done, I could use the data in those columns to verify the identities of the patients and select for the entries that weren't found in the master tracker. Then the script would append the entries to the master tracker. Simple.