First desktop app: transfer gremlin

I wrote my first desktop app, called The ADP/ACS Transfer Gremlin (ADPGremlin). It is a little GUI automation script for transferring data from a spreadsheet we get from ADP to a screen on our back-office system, ACS (which has pretty dismal integration options). Screenshot:



Here are the modules used:

• pywin32
  
• win32clipboard—for prepping text to be pasted
  
• win32gui—for switching windows
• SendKeys—for sending keystrokes to the active window. (I like this module.)
• wxPython—for building the GUI
• xlrd—for reading Excel files

It is packaged with py2exe as a single-file executable, and has a custom icon both in Windows Explorer and the window itself. Source code is available.

ADPGremlin should save our accountant about an hour each time he uses it. It took me about 10 hours to write, so it should pay for itself time-wise in about 5 months. Most of the time was spent learning wxPython (and it's still pretty ugly). The only real gotcha learned is that you have to remember to use the 'b' modes when reading/writing files on Windows.

Bigger picture: I've had it in the back of my head to write a user-friendly GUI for Aspen, and now I know how to do it. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.