Automation: the automatic operation or control of equipment, a process, or a system.
(from the American Heritage Dictionary)

Many of the application programs that are used in business automate tasks that were formerly done by hand. QuickBooks' printing of invoices is one example. Spreadsheets performing calculations is another.

Automating Windows level tasks, or Microsoft Office (TM) tasks is the next step in productivity. This can be accomplished by Windows batch files, script files, scheduled tasks, or a combination of these items.

Automation Example
As an example, I keep track of my work hours in an Excel spreadsheet, which I call a work report. There is a single spread sheet for each day of the week. I want the spread sheet files named with both the date, and the day of the week so they are easy to identify. I also want the individual work sheets inside the spreadsheet to be named with the date and the day of the week. As I fill them out, I'll add a customer acronym to the work sheet name. The Excel file for Christmas 2007 would be named wr 2007-12-25Tue.xls.

To create these sheets by hand, I would copy a template file, then rename the new file with the appropriate information. Then I would open the file, and name the work sheet tabs to match. Creating these sheets by hand took about 20 minutes per week, approximately 17 hours per year. Using a combination of a batch file, script file and Windows task manager, these files now are created automatically, 7 at a time, at midnight of the new work week. It took me 8 hours to write the scripts and set this up, saving me 9 hours the first year, and 17 hours per year since. It is one less mundane task to be accomplished every week.

Candidates for Automation

• Anything that is occurs regularly and has non varying steps.
• File and folder related operations. Creation, deletion, moves transmittal, or renames.
• Backups of any kind
• Disk defragmentation (excluding Windows 2000 (TM))