Goal of this post is to introduce a small program developed by Aastat
Background and motivation
In medical datascience we occasionally must send data to FDA. Usually the data is parsed
from tens or hundreds of invidual *.txt or *.rtf files and manually added together using
some text editing which is usually microsoft word. This approach usually takes hours, it
is very suspectible to manual erros and FDA standards require that there must be table of
contents page with hyperlinks.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The solution for this is to automate it all away. I coded up a script in Python that completely
automates the process. The user doesn’t need to do anything other than select the files, change
few options depending on the layout and structure of provided files and then press the compile
button that outputs the document with the automatically generated table of contents.
And the best of all this that the program is completely free and open source so you can edit the
code, see what code others have written and if you’d like to contribute more features we’d love that
But I don’t have Python installed or resources to learn it
No worries. I built in all the dependencies into one *.exe file that provides Python and all the
required libraries. All you need to do is to download the project from github,
extract the files from the packed file and start up the Creator.exe (name might change later or)
Okay I got the files, but what do all these options mean?
The amount of options looks intimidating and most of the names are not that informative what the setting
does fortunately there is HUGE documentation in the github main page. There you can find everything
you need to know what the settings do, what you need to set before running the program and how the
program works behind the scenes.
If you encounter any bugs or problems you can contact Aastat and we might fix them in the future. In
case you know how to program in Python and want to contribute to the project create a pull request on
github and we’ll check it out!
Mikael Roto
10/8/2021
