How Will Python Improve My Daily Work?

Python is not just for professional programmers. Learning Python can dramatically change the daily work of marketers, researchers, doctors, and even artists. Let’s see how Python is enhancing jobs in different industries.

You might think that only computer programmers, web developers, software engineers, and other tech-industry professionals are the only ones who use Python at work. But the truth is that just about any job can be made easier by learning a little Python.

Why Learn Python?

If you are considering learning Python, you are one step closer to a key milestone in your work life. Coding is an important skill for people of various roles, not just programmers. To keep up with the changes, you need to develop new skills. Knowing Python can be a competitive advantage in tomorrow’s job market.

But there are many programming languages. Why should you choose Python? There’s a simple answer to this question. The simple answer is that Python is pretty easy to get started with.

First, it has a simple syntax that makes it very accessible to people without an IT background. Second, Python is highly productive and usually requires fewer lines of code than other programming languages. Finally, Python is versatile and can be used for just about anything, including analyzing and visualizing data, creating applications, building blockchains, and much more.

With all these advantages, Python has made it to the top of the most popular programming languages. During the last few years, it’s become an undisputed leader in programming language tutorial searches on Google, leaving Java, JavaScript, C#, and others far behind. Of course, other programming languages also have their benefits. For example, Java is faster than Python. (For more differences between Python and Java, check out this concise comparison guide.) You can learn more about why Python is so incredibly popular in this article.

Automating Routine Tasks with Python

As mentioned before, one of the reasons behind the high popularity of Python is its applicability to a variety of tasks. There is a popular book by Al Sweigart called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. It provides numerous examples of Python doing in minutes what would take hours to do by hand. The most interesting part is that you need only basic knowledge of Python to apply the solutions in this book.

While I don’t want to overwhelm you with code samples, I’ll build on the key idea of this book and show you how some routine tasks from your daily work can be easily automated with Python.

Organizing Files on Your Computer

When working on long and complex projects, you often end up with dozens of folders and hundreds or thousands of files related to that project. In the ideal world, you want these files to be organized in a specific way, with file names following certain naming conventions. In the real world, lots of parallel assignments with tight deadlines often result in total chaos inside your project folder. Luckily, there are certain Python modules that can rescue you from renaming, copying, moving, and compressing all these files by hand.

Working with Excel Spreadsheets

Even though Excel offers lots of automating opportunities by itself, there are certain tasks that can be further automated with Python. With a bit of code, you can automatically compare data between several spreadsheets, check for blank cells or invalid data, and combine data from multiple Excel spreadsheets to create informative reports. Learn more about using Python to work with Excel files in this introductory guide.

Working with PDFs

You find PDF files everywhere, storing reports, texts, graphs, images, etc. It’s a great way to share nicely formatted information, but unfortunately PDFs are usually very hard to work with when you do anything other than read them. Here again, Python comes to the rescue. Certain Python modules can help you manipulate PDFs, enabling you to extract text from them, combine select pages from multiple files, add a logo or watermark to the specified pages, and much more.

An example of such a module is OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which is used in an online PDF to Word converter. It allows tools to retrieve text from PDFs and images and convert them into editable text.

Mining Contact Data

Whether you are a headhunter looking for brilliant job candidates or a salesperson searching for potential customers, you may often find yourself spending days and weeks creating contact databases via web scraping and data mining. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Python modules can help you gather this data automatically, resulting in a well-organized spreadsheet containing contact details and other basic information that you need.

Sending Emails

Python cannot take over all your email-related tasks, but it can be a great help when you need to send multiple emails with similar content to a long list of recipients. Of course, today we have commercial software available that can handle many mailing tasks automatically. However, some tasks cannot be addressed with the existing software; they require an individual approach. For example, with Python, you can send each employee a different email depending on their department, seniority level, etc.

How Different Industries Use Python

In addition to automating routine tasks, Python can assist in things specific to particular professions and industries. Let’s see a couple of examples.

Marketing

Python can automate multiple marketing activities. For example, it can create professional-quality visualizations that enhance marketing analysis, streamline the data collection process, automate customer segmentation and customer feedback analysis, optimize ad campaigns, build sophisticated recommendation algorithms, automate A/B testing, and much more. Python is indeed a great tool for simplifying marketers’ daily work. In this article, I elaborate on why you should use Python in marketing.

Science

What are the key drivers behind the inflation rate? Is the difference in the performance of a new drug vs. a placebo statistically significant? Is the transmission rate of the last COVID-19 variant significantly higher? Scientists across research fields apply statistical models to answer their questions. In previous years, they mostly relied on statistical software packages to build their models; currently, Python is gaining popularity among scientists because of its flexibility, simple syntax, and low cost (it’s free). Python allows them to build complex statistical models and visualizations with just a few lines of code, making it a favorite tool even for seasoned researchers that were using different software packages.

Healthcare

Today, untold amounts of data are generated by patients, clinics, and hospitals. Python can help to make sense of this data. It is the programming language used (almost exclusively) to build machine learning models that predict diseases before severe symptoms occur and improve diagnostics based on MRIs and ECGs. Some of machine learning’s applications in medicine include monitoring a patient’s heartbeat for arrhythmias, providing early warning of sepsis, discovering new medicines, etc.

Also, clinicians spend too much time being data clerks. There are already patient management solutions available that were built with Python to help doctors and nurses save time for working with patients rather than documents. In the future, entering notes into medical records is likely to be done fully by artificial intelligence (AI).

Art

AI-based models are also invading the art industry. Algorithms can create art; Christie’s has already sold an AI-generated portrait. However, it’s not likely that AI will replace artists. Rather, artists can create new original works by experimenting with artificial intelligence. They can use AI-generated images as inspiration for their own paintings or they can feed specific images into an algorithm to get an interesting result. These algorithms are developed by AI researchers; however, artists with a basic knowledge of Python can slightly adjust these models and use them in their own art experiments.

In one of my previous articles, I give more examples of what Python is used for.

Learning Python to Improve Your Daily Work

Now you know how Python can  automate boring tasks at your current job, increasing your efficiency and maybe even improving your creativity. It might be just a programming language, but Python can change your life for the better. So, why not learn to use Python?

Right now, as of March 2021, LearnPython.com is free. That means you can complete these Python tracks for $0.00:

• Learn Programming with Python includes 5 interactive courses that contain 410 coding challenges. It will introduce you to the fundamentals of computer programming.
• Data Processing with Python is for those who want to learn more after they’ve completed the basics. In this mini-track, you’ll learn how to work with strings and the most common file formats (CSV, XLSX, and JSON) using Python. 297 interactive exercises are included!

Still not sure where to start? Check out this guide covering 10 ways to practice Python online. There’s a good chance you’ll get really excited about the opportunities Python provides. Maybe you’ll even end up as a Python freelancer one day!

Thanks for reading and happy learning!