Office Automation
with jdBasic
Every office week hides a few hours of the same small chores: sorting downloads, renaming scans, copying numbers from one sheet into another, writing the same mail again, building the Friday report. This book hands those chores to small programs that run on your own computer.
55 recipes in three levels. Every program was tested before it was printed, and every recipe tells you how many minutes a week it gives back. Added up, the book is worth about 21 hours a week.
PDF: 739 pages, 3.2 MB. EPUB: 1.1 MB. Free to read, no account, no mail address.
Three levels, 55 recipes
Easy
E01 to E18, no programming
A setup wizard copies the recipes you pick into your work folder, asks for your folders and sets up the schedules. You answer questions, the programs run.
- Downloads Butler, Batch Renamer
- Time Tracker, Duplicate Finder
- Printable Week, Guest Wi-Fi Card
Medium
M01 to M18, documents and data
Invoices, letters, calendars and reports, built from your own data. Excel and Word files are written without Excel and Word being installed.
- Invoice Generator, Mail Merge
- Report Merger, Data Cleaner
- Personal Dashboard, Slide Builder
Expert
X01 to X19, programs that run alone
A job server with logs, retries and health checks, tests for your own programs, secrets in the Credential Manager, and a language model that drives the rest.
- Personal Job Server, Health Checks
- Find Anything, Web Harvester
- Let an AI Drive, Spreadsheet to Web App
One bonus recipe per level takes over keyboard and mouse for the programs that offer no other way in. Chapter 2 is a BASIC course for readers who have never written a line, chapter 6 is about living with programs that run on their own, and the appendices are a language reference, a library reference, 25 error messages with their cause, and every setting the recipes read.
Tested before it was printed
Every listing in the book is included from a file that is checked on each build: all 55 recipes go through the linter, run their own test in the interpreter, are compiled to an .exe and run again as that .exe.
The 83 small examples in the running text are executed too, and the build stops if one of them prints something other than what the page shows.
The book builds itself
The manuscript is Markdown. jdBasic sets the 749 pages, hyphenates and justifies them, places the figures, numbers the index, and writes the print PDF, the screen PDF, the EPUB, the DOCX and the cover with its calculated spine.
No LaTeX, no InDesign, no typesetting service. The toolchain is in the jdBasic repository next to the recipes.
What you need
jdBasic 1.1 for Windows, the pack with the native forms, because the setup wizard opens a window. It needs no administrator rights, no runtime and no account. Since 1.1 that pack also carries the native compiler, so any recipe can be handed to a colleague as a single .exe.
New in jdBasic 1.1
- The compiler caught up with the interpreter: COM automation compiles, lambdas keep their closures, TRY has FINALLY, and an error carries its line and stack.
- Ten new library modules, among them full-text search, worker pools, archives, PowerPoint files and metrics.
- Builds for Linux and macOS next to the four Windows packs, all signed or checksummed on the release page.
Note: the recipes read and write your own files and send your own mail. Read what a recipe does before you schedule it, and try it on a copy of a folder first. Chapter 6 has a section on talking to your IT department.
Give your week back to yourself
The book is free to read as PDF and e-book. The text is yours to share under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, the programs are MIT licensed, so what you build from them stays yours.