In my scrappy work environment I have to help set up some subscriber emails on the side of my main production engineering work. We’re short-handed.

Every week, sometimes multiple times in a week, I get effort approval emails. For each item in the approvals list I have to file a ticket, filling out the details expressed in the email.

Doing this once maybe takes half an hour. Doing it every week, or more often, gets annoying, frustrating, etc. Writing something to take care of it in some spare moments is making the process just that much less of a burden.

In short, if you do it only once in a while—sure, not a big deal. If you’re doing that banal half-hour task on the regular and it blocks you from getting something else done that benefits from more attention then the effort expended to automate it makes a lot of sense.

You don't know what she is doing. Maybe now she can adjust a report to return the figures she wants, for just a week's worth of data or whatever. Most people can benefit by becoming more computer literate.

Automation doesn’t need to be end to end. Consider a case if you need to do an aggregation with pdfs, simple script to read and pull the data points is pretty trivial. You will still need to type the results by hand in excel (for example), but that « automation » just reduced the effort it’d take otherwise.

Huh?

    pdftotext
    massage with grep, tr, sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc
    paste into Calc or Excel (or some SQL first)