I was working at a city hall and I created this program to reduce a considerable ammount of administrative load. I had to generate around 20 - 25 pdf reports each months for the relatives of the users of our service (one for each user of the service). Thus, I created a piece of software that allowed me to reduce around 10 hours of administrative load per month by automating the generation of these PDF reports using google forms & google spreadsheets, Python and *LaTeX.

The need for that aroused when I was managing a team of 8 social care assistants: their role was to support old people in town (dependent people, with slow mobility, etc.) and I was responsible for communicating with user's relatives in a comprehensive way, and inform them what our team did with their old relatives, while carrying social suport labour with the elderly.

This repository contains the files with which PDF reports were automatically generated once a month. The pdfs were generated by adjusting a LaTeX template to each user using a Python script. Those templates were fitted with the google form spreadsheets data from the support workers.

The procedure, once a month, was as follows:

1. Downloading the spreadsheets file¹ with the data the social care assistants updated every day via google forms, replacing the previous file.

2. Gramatically correct the column DESCRIPCIO¹, within spreadsheets file with the data the social care assistants updated every day via google forms, replacing the previous file, as contents need to be polished.

3. Go to main.py, within volcatgeActesScript folder, and update the value arguments of the function call main(data_incial, data_final) where data_inicial and data_final are the first day of the month and the last day of the month, respectively (the program will just filter out the social care services between those two days so as the report for each user just contains one month, as we intended to).²

4. By executing main.py the program will, for one, take the data from the spreadsheets file and, for the other, it'll use the string variables filled with LaTeX syntax that are stored in the template plantillaLat 6ED8 ex.py³ to finally generate a .tex file for each user, ready to be compiled with pdflatex. All these .tex files will be compiled at once using pdfLATEX by the same script, automatically creating the .pdfs⁴. If you dive in the template plantillaLatex.py you'll find the decision of writing latex code within the .py file was efficient, not a mere whim to use the language I feel most comfortable in: you can see that the variable inici has two python placeholders that will get the data in from the spreadsheets file and that the variable taula_long_variable is responsible for generating, at each iteration ⁵, the rows of the table presented to the families. The loop I am talking about is the following:

   • {{\\Large\\bfseries {} \\par}} would get us the name of each user for each .tex template, being exported in the .tex file as {\\Large\\bfseries NAME SURNAME SURNAME' \\par};
   • {{\\large del {} al {}.\\par}}would get us {\\large del dd/mm/yyyy al DD/MM/YYYY.\\par}
   • """\t\t\t {} & {} & {} \\\\ \n""" would get us 11/05/2021 & Natasha Romanov & consequuntur ullam dolorum pariatur mollitia animi eum nam? \\

5. You can consult the results seeing the .pdfs within the folder informesPerUsuari. As an example, see, for a given user:

   1. This are some of the rows from the spreadsheets file (i.e. each highlighted row is a social service care day given to user 16 by Diana Prince or Natasha Romanov that will comprehend part of the subset query that will appear only for user 16 on the pdf file):
   2. And this one is the .tex file for user 16, which will generate after compiling it the .pdf file as you can see down below (you can find all those files within informesPerUsuari subfolder):

      • Cover letter

      • table with social care workers for that given user: