Non-Source - Need something to automate a specific task for me

[Chris D]

Hi guys,

Right... I have a big task to do at work which is hopefully gonna be made a lot easier.

I have a spreadsheet that has 3000 customer reference numbers in it (that's just data from one City, from only persons with surnames begining with A ;(), and I need to load these reference numbers up into a website, one by one, hit print, and then move on to the next and hit print, and so on and so on.

The intranet links are formed in this format:

http://intranet.company.co.uk/search.aspx?customerreference=1234567890

Therefore, to make the job slightly easier, I can copy a reference number from the spreadsheet, and just put it onto the end of that link to speed the process up slightly.

It's not efficient enough, it's tedious and repetitive and I have lots of other work to do besides this, so I don't really have time to manually enter in the details and print.

What I need, is some program/script that will take the first 20 customer ID numbers, open them up in Internet Explorer (by only changing the reference number switch in the internet link), automatically print the notes, then close internet explorer and then move onto the next.

Any ideas - bear in mind I have no knowledge of any kinda programming so don't go saying things like blah blah visual basic if else not multiplied by 8 print blah c ++ because it doesn't mean anything to me

I'm looking for a freeware program that exists that already does this, someone to do it for me, or step by step instructions on what I need to do.

Thanks!

 

[Epsi]

By print, you mean get internet explorer to dump the the page out to a printer? We're not talking about pressing a button on the page or anything like that?

 

[Epsi]

Ok, assuming you just want the page printed, can you give me some information about the layout of the data on the spreadsheet? I should be able to rattle this off tonight, in C#. You'll need the .net framework v2.0 installed. If you have the latest version of GCFScape you'll already have it.

 

[Chris D]

Yes, I need IE to just dump it to the printer.

The layout of the spreadsheet is simple:

It's simply a list of numbers from row 1 down to row 3768:

11984736322
12029229191
11827227271
11983278347

etc.

The task that I'm doing with these print outs is on a day by day basis, so I only ever need the program to print off the first 20 customer records. What I'll do after I've got my printouts for the day is delete the first 20 reference numbers from the spreadsheet, and then repeat the next day. (Of course I'll delete them in such a way that the data starts at row 1 again.)

Thanks so much Epsi

 

[Epsi]

Ok, done.

http://aiusepsi.hobby-site.com/Chris_D/

Open the link in IE, the install will flake out in Firefox. If you need anything changing just give me a bell.

 

[Epsi]

Forgot to mention, you'll need to re-save the spreadsheet as a .csv, comma seperated/delimited values. I was doing it far too quickly to consider trying to import .xls files!

 

[Bert]

Sounds to me, you'd be better using something like Crystal Reports for this. Just load them in a database (I suspect those lists are already comming from a database) and setup your format of the report.

 

[Chris D]

Thanks Epsi, this will definitely save me a lot of time. Looks good

Bert - yeah there already is a database, and I assume it's probably an SQL database as the information is kept on an intranet site. However, I don't have access to the actual database file, nor would I be given it, to be honest.

Epsi's sorted it though, it's looking good

 

[Epsi]

Heh, no problem. I enjoy programming stuff and little projects like this just give me a good excuse to!