Seriously, how should a community based on short two- to three-paragraph answers react to question after question like this:

I am new to python. I would like to write a program which can collect information from multiple excel and pdf documents to output that in one single excel document to show similarities and differences between the documents . Is this possible ? If so, how and where would I start writing such a programme in python? Thanks

I haven’t tried anything yet

I mean, I’m glad that someone looks at that problem and thinks “programming could do this”, because it could, but it’s kind of a big task and getting someone from “I haven’t tried anything and am brand new to python” to that is beyond any question-and-answer forum. Welcome to programming, you may be able to get there, but it’s going to be a bit of a hike.

This hasn’t been my experience at all, but I’m old and have been using SO since it was new.

I have stopped visiting it to answer questions because the questions aren’t interesting anymore. They’re either “how to do this incredibly obscure thing in SOMELIBRARY” (where I’ve never heard of that library) or “why does my function exit early at the first return statement instead of continuing on” (basic “you misunderstand programming so fundamentally a single answer is unlikely to help” kind of questions)

As far as I can tell, the range of “I’ve tried this, and partially gotten it working, but this thing does FOO when it should do BAR” questions don’t show up, or at least it doesn’t show up when I open the site.

Answering basic questions again and again and again isn’t fun. It’s something I could be paid to do, I suppose, but I’m not paid for that.

You can always have a CI step that runs mypy on your code.

For your home office, see this article and then pass it along to friends. It just makes everything easier: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine

When the poster says “I often just use Photoscan on my phone” what they mean is “instead of dealing with the physical scanner at all I often use an app on my phone that takes a picture of a document with the phone’s camera, flattens out the image in software, and leaves me with a pdf the same as if the scanner were doing its job”.

That is, the scanner doesn’t “work on the phone”, but these days phone cameras and automatic image processing programs are so good actual scanners can often be bypassed.

Does any place still use HP laserjet II-series printers that gave that error? Those things were workhorses but it’s been 25-30 years.

Besides, this error isn’t that bad: it means “I’ve been asked to print something on letter-size paper, but I don’t have letter-sized paper. Please load some.” Either give it some paper of the size it wants, or check that the paper tray it has is properly set to “this is letter-size paper” and not to “this is A4-size paper”.

That’s the real cause of why this error was so common: US letter paper and A4 paper are almost—but not exactly—the same size, and there was a switch on the paper tray you had to set to tell it what it was loaded with, and the printer refused to print on the wrong-sized paper. In other words, PC LOAD LETTER is just another entry in the list of things that are frustrating and annoying because the US never adopted metric.

You want something annoying try PAPER JAM IN AREA 3, where you have to open the thing up carefully and hope that the paper doesn’t rip as you remove it also be very careful not to touch that one spot that is super hot and will burn you. This was usually caused by someone somewhere deciding to save some money and order everyone the cheap, crappy paper that did this all the time instead of the good stuff.