My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per week each, all year long. They were all middle aged or older people and had done basically the same thing for over a decade.<p>So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long.<p>No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.
I've actually spun off a company to do exactly this for small businesses. Slack, trello, zapier, CRMs...the potential to automate is MASSIVE and a wildly underserved market. It used to be that knowing how to be expert at Excel made you irreplaceable. Same goes now for power users of Zapier and other workflow automation tools.
<i>> Japanese mortgage lender Aruhi Corp. started using RPA Holdings’ services in January 2017 to automate some application processes. It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications and then check that everything is in order. That’s cut the average time taken per application to about 10 minutes from an hour.</i><p>Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?
I'd like a bot which ripped the articles from Bloomberg and created a simple lightweight output. It's Getting to the point where I avoid anything on Bloomberg.