This beginner-friendly session is designed to help those with little programming experience take advantage of Python's robust code base to solve problems that were previously out of reach. Students, writers, musicians, photographers, athletes, and even business power users who are pushing the limits of Microsoft Excel and Access can learn how to get started with simple, practical examples of task automation with Python, with an emphasis on cleaning data files. Participants will be given an overview of Python learning resources and how to install the tool. We will illustrate a short Python program which automates the process of reading many files from a zip file (birth names from data.gov) to extract selected information from each file.
