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Practical Python Projects: Automate Your Work and Boost Your Business

Move beyond theory and build real-world Python projects that save time, streamline tasks, and add value to your work. This hands-on course guides you through creating practical tools for data handling, reporting, email automation, file management, and simple web scraping – all tailored for UK adult,

360 min8 modulesBeginner friendly
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Free to take. This course does not use any Learning Credits.

What you’ll be able to do

By the end of this course, you will have built at least six working Python projects that you can adapt for your own workplace or business needs, and you will be confident in writing scripts to automate repetitive tasks, process data, and generate useful outputs.

Course outline

A clear route from first principles to practical confidence

  1. 01

    Getting Started with Python for Business

    • Installing Python and choosing a code editor (VS Code or PyCharm)
    • Your first business script: renaming and organising files in a folder
    • Understanding variables, data types, and simple user input
    • Writing clean, commented code that others can understand
  2. 02

    Working with Spreadsheets and CSV Files

    • Reading CSV files and Excel sheets with the csv and openpyxl libraries
    • Filtering rows and calculating totals from sales or expense data
    • Creating a new formatted spreadsheet report from raw data
    • Handling common errors: missing values, wrong formats, and large files
  3. 03

    Automating Email and Notifications

    • Setting up SMTP to send emails from a Gmail or Outlook account
    • Sending personalised bulk emails using data from a spreadsheet
    • Adding attachments and simple HTML formatting to your emails
    • Building a daily reminder or status report email script
  4. 04

    Web Scraping for Market Research

    • Understanding robots.txt and the basics of web scraping etiquette
    • Using requests and BeautifulSoup to scrape product prices or contact info
    • Saving scraped data to a CSV file for further analysis
    • Handling dynamic content with Selenium (a gentle introduction)
  5. 05

    Building a Simple Data Dashboard

    • Installing and using the Plotly library for interactive charts
    • Creating bar charts, line graphs, and pie charts from your data
    • Building a multi-page dashboard with Streamlit
    • Adding filters and dropdowns so users can explore the data
  6. 06

    Automating PDF Reports and Invoices

    • Creating a simple PDF with the FPDF library
    • Adding tables, images, and company logos to your PDF
    • Generating a batch of personalised invoices from a spreadsheet
    • Merging multiple PDFs into one report file
  7. 07

    Task Scheduling and System Automation

    • Using the schedule library to run scripts at set times
    • Setting up a daily data backup script
    • Automating file cleanup and archiving on your computer
    • Introduction to Task Scheduler (Windows) and cron (Mac/Linux)
  8. 08

    Putting It All Together: A Capstone Project

    • Choosing a real-world problem to solve with Python
    • Planning your project: inputs, outputs, and steps
    • Building and testing your solution step by step
    • Presenting your project and getting feedback from peers