Hello. I'm a layperson with no prior experience or knowledge of VisualCron or programming for that matter.
Although I have done some research into the software and watched tutorials but it's all a bit advanced for me to understand and so I am brought here to ask a few questions about my needs specifically and see if they match the capabilities of the software.
I'm trying to remove repetitive tasks from my business;
Task 1. New order comes in via email, can I automate the creation of new job folder and then copy relevant files into folder for the job?
Task 2. Automate processing of a database using a 3rd party program?
Task 3. I work extensively with excel spreadsheets, can this software feed in variables, take out result, feed that into another spreadsheet, take out results and so on?
Task 4. Output a spreadsheet to XML, visit a site, login, and upload the XML data?
Task 5. Automatically create a PDF, save it to a folder, then send the same file to print once specific programmed excel tasks have been completed?
Task 6. Program checks an SFTP folder at a specific time, waiting for a new file, checking every X minutes, once new file is present, can I make VisualCron download the file and process it? Specifically turn it from an XML file into a CSV file?
Task 7. Make VisualCron send email notifications based on specific tasks have been completed?
If someone can tell me if these tasks are within VisualCrons capabilities or not, then that will help shortcut whether or not I should be investing more time trying to understand the software.

Support can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll give it a shot

1) Yes. I assume you mean a folder on your fileserver, and that you want to place the email attachemts there.
2) Yes. The way to do it depends on the api the third party program exposes. You can execute commands and powershell from VC. You can also wrap the third party code in a .NET library and call this library from VC. The .NET solution works for any problem you want to solve by the way, but assumes you know one of those languages.
3)Probably not the way you describe it. You can call vba macros, so you could have one 'master' spreadsheet with vba that does all the stuff you want, and then you call this macro from VC. The macro could for example write the results to file, and then you read this file when done. You can also access excel cells directly from VC if you prefer.
4) As far as I know you cannot convert directly from Excel to xml, The xml experts on this site can answer this one ( I would personally use the .NET task for this). There is a web macro task for opening websites, but I have never tried it. Somebody else will have to answer whether or not you can login and upload with this task
5)There are quite a few pdf tasks, but I have never tried them. You can make a pdf file using those, but it depends on what you mean by 'automatically'. With regards to the excel part, it could work if you call a macro in an excel sheet.
6)Yes. Converting from xml to csv can be done with .net or xslt.
7)Yes

Get rid of Excel :)

Thomas

Thanks Thomas. I appreciate your time to reply.
So overall, it's possible I could complete 90% of what I was asking! That's very encouraging and I think that's enough for me to learn more about the software, macros, and .NET (whatever that is, but I think I'll start with that first)
The most interesting thing you wrote, which was probably just a throw away comment for you, but caught my attention the most, was when you said 'get rid of excel'. How does one 'get rid of excel?' and what might be the substitute? I'm fascinated by the prospect.
Also, realistically, as a layperson, how long would it take for a me to learn .NET, VB & VisualCron to then be able to implement some of the most difficult tasks?
Thanks again Thomas.

Hi

Nothing wrong with Excel, it can just be a pain to work with from the 'outside', as would be the case with VC. The substitute to Excel would be a proper database , a relational one (eg Sql Server, MySql, Postgress, Oracle) or nosql (eg MongoDb, Cassandra ). Don't go for Ms Access, it blows! . The learning curve is a bit steaper than Excel, but once you have figured it out, everything becomes easier than working with Excel.

I think you would be able to solve 100% of what you want to do, but the solutions won't necessarily be 'out of the box'. Some of the tasks you ask for are easy to solve, and some will require a bit of work. Dot Net takes years to master, but to create a simple class that does simple things is not that hard (maybe a few months of practicing). To deal with xml you will have to learn a bit about xml schemas and xslt/xpath. I find that this is much easier to solve with something called Linq in C# (one of the .Net languages). But this is matter of preference.

Anyway, all the problems can be solved, and you will get help here when you are stuck. The way to think about VC is that it that it is a toolbox, and you have to piece together things to achieve what you want. Sometimes you wil find a task that does everything you need in 1 step, and sometimes you have string together 20 tasks to get there.