[sleet]

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a big category of tools that can be summarised as ‘automating boring stuff’. You often see it used for repetitive data entry, e.g.

1. Load excel sheet from X:\...

2. Login to Y

3. For each row navigate to ... then enter data

4. Submit, if there’s a validation error add it to and excel workbook

5. Email exception report to ...

[halo]

What software is generally used for this? Is there anything available for the average person that doesn’t require spending a small fortune?

[janstice]

Uipath and automation anywhere seem to be big players with community/free starter editions. PWC (who are spearheading the RPA at $work) seem to have decreed that all their staff are going to use uipath worldwide.

There are a handful of open source RPA tools, but I don’t think there’s a breakthrough project yet.

[mahalol]

Azure LogicApps are good for these kind of silly integrations, if it has a connector for it then it's a piece of cake.

They have a pretty limited use case though.