The General Problem

The problem: Generate and print 46 gradesheets, copying name, roll number and a few grades from an existing google sheet. The template for the gradesheet is already ready, but unfortunately is a .docx.

The simple and obvious way of doing it: Copy template into a new doc and replace the fields with those from the sheets. There are 4 of us, if we split the task - hopefully doable in less than an hour. But the risk of human errors creeping in, and 3/4 belong to the programmer subspecies. i.e, these people will quit at editing the second document due to the monotonous work.

In the end, we decided to automate the process. Downloaded the sheet as a .csv, created a python script to copy template, replace variables with values from the .csv. Getting a matching design ready for the template in latex took some time. There were a few hiccups with the pdflatex compiler. The process overall took approximately 2 hours.

xkcd: The General Problem