All non-techies, I bet that’s the question that pops into your mind whenever you hear the word. But, unlike most people’s misconception, it is not very hard (at least, not impossible). All it takes it is a good know-how of the problem and the basic understanding of a handful of tools.
Why is something automated?
You wake up every morning, brush your teeth, take a shower (I’m not standing anywhere close to you if you don’t), have your breakfast and ride your way to the office/school – of course, after getting dressed. Imagine what it’d be like if you can do all of that in like 2 seconds – pretty amazing, right? Anything that’s redundant is automated to:
- Get things done faster (like the Flash)
- Eliminate human errors (like shoving the toothbrush up your nose in sleep or dropping the soap into the toilet hole, etc.,)
Okay, fine… But how?
Sometimes, the answer to this lies in the problem itself. If you try to automate things just because you want to, then you would probably end up with something useless. Necessity is the ‘mama bear’ of invention. Also think of how much you invest (time & resources) on automating and how much you save in the long run – if it’s not used often, it’s not worth automating.
Before automating a solution, see if it can be optimized. A solution involving 100 steps can be automated. But, if it can be optimized to 20 steps, then automating would be much more efficient. Break down a large problem into smaller problems and try to understand how each piece of the puzzle works.
Does that mean learning a programming language?
Unfortunately, the only boneheads capable of performing repeated tasks at the blink of an eye are the modern computers. So, YES, you need to learn to code. But remember, you don’t have to write a sonnet – just learn to recognize one.
“Nothing can be automated that cannot be done manually!”
First, you’ll have to know the entire process of solving the problem manually and then, write it in a way that a dumb machine like your computer can understand.
Don’t boil the ocean…
No – your first attempt shouldn’t be writing an AI program that will analyze the stock market and predict the trend of a stock over the next few weeks (although, it sounds pretty amazing). Start with something simple: Most of us use Microsoft Excel at work when handling statistical/financial data and there’s a lot that you can automate within and outside Excel. AutomateExcel seems like a good place to start. There are also other semi-programming tools that allow you to automate by providing a friendly UI that requires lesser code. But, the amount of customization is quite limited.
Here, let me get you started, how about automatically applying a border, font styles and background color to selected cells on a worksheet?
(Psst… You can also record a macro and check out the code in Excel)
Do feel free to write back to me on how that goes. Good luck automating!
Just about anything 