If you use a Windows system for work and have the permissions to, I highly recommend you learn Powershell if you haven't already.

I've only started learning it a few months, but it's already improved my workflow immensely since it's a decent bit more powerful than batch scripts, but not as 'heavy handed' for small tasks as a programming language like C# feels sometimes.

I kinda regret ignoring it for so long, I noticed it installed on my high school laptop and toyed with it a bit outside of class, but then gravitated more towards python which I can't use at my current job. really wish high school me had the attention span to learn both back then.

Meet my friend, WSL.

@atheist use it at home, not allowed at work

No.
Powershell is a crapshot.

> "it's already improved my workflow immensely"

Curious, what specifically has Powershell improved?

@PaperTrail well for example we compare files A LOT using winmerge, and with the folder structure of the server it would take me a minimum of 6 or 7 clicks to select the files for comparison. I found win merge had a CLI and that i could automate that in either Batch or Powershell, since most of our 'work scripts' are already batch i decided to do powershell just to differentiate.

Or times where we work with excel files, and need to manipulate the data in a simple way. I was taught to do the changes by opening excel, manually changing things, and then saving as CSV. I found I could do the changes with powershell with the exact same results as doing it manually, and they already had a program written years ago to convert to csv (i do need to fix it eventually though cause everyone complains about that program)

Just simple time saving things like that where I was shown the manual process but there's a faster process that saves even just a couple of click like 20 times a day

@jester5537 I would use gnu tools for the first one and a real programming language for the second use case. If I'm lazy and it's just click work for me than RPA will do.
But that's me I seriously hate powershell. Had to combat to much badly documented awkward shit in it.
The most important thing is that you got to automate the boring work. I would recommend looking at RPA though

@hjk101 I hadn't heard of RPA before, It looks interesting, and i'll definitely see if it would work better.

I would simply use a VM running a linux system and do my work there