I'm using copy/paste to save public records to a spreadsheet. I want to automate this!
A tenant's-rights lawyer was daily running a search for Tenant/Landlord cases and was copy/pasting the case information into a spreadsheet which was subsequently used to mail merge advertisement letters to the defendants. My client needed a more efficient way to collect this information.
Leveraging the power of the artoo.js JavaScript library, I was able to completely automate the data collection process, saving the client the trouble of clicking and collecting info from the more than 200 cases filed each day.
The deliverable script was easily installed to the client's browser. The client visits the case search page as usual, but now clicks the tool to appropriately auto-fill the search criteria and submit the form.
The search results page is where the magic happens. Clicking the tool on this page begins collecting the results from the entire result set, automatically proceeding to the next page until all the data is collected and the resulting dataset is downloaded to the user's desktop as a standard CSV file.
Now, the client's existing mail merge process can continue as before, except that they have saved an hour or more in the collection process!