Coding for non-programmers: Why we need better GUI automation tools
I thought I would disagree, but I very much agree that we need something like zapier for custom internal processes. I’ve automated thousands of hours worth of things with zapier and gsheets.<p>But if there isn’t a zap for it, and you can’t hack your way around it, nontechnical users are generally out of luck.<p>I would love for gsheets to be able to extend further into the browser and my desktop, because there is so much value and potential there. For example, a problem I worked on yesterday: I receive an email every day that has an attachment with the .eml file type. In that attachment is a link to a csv. I need the data from the csv in excel or sheets for daily use. There are no zaps to convert a .eml to any filetype - so I had to automate the attachment downloading to gdrive on my desktop, have a local automation run to convert .eml to .txt, then back in zapier grab the url from the .txt and deliver it to gsheets. Then the gsheet can just grab the data from the csv url.<p>Problem is - I couldn’t figure out how to automate the .eml conversion, so I’m stuck!