I am working as a lawyer in an insurance brokerage company ("Marsh", I think they have an office in Minneapolis also) and I mainly use it to compile claims statistics. The Insurance companies send us their lists of claims for our clients and I have to check these lists against our files and finally put the figures in our database.

As all the Insurance companies use their own formats for their lists (from freely formatted text files, over CSV-files to Excel spreadsheets) I have written a number of perl-scripts to translate these lists to a common format, which is then inserted in our database.

These scripts also check for new records and updated records and flags them appropriately, so I don't have to go through all the claims records each time a new list is received.

Finally I also wrote the perl-scripts to output these data to our website, so my colleagues can see the data on their screens (and they don't have to ask me to print a copy for them -- "lazy programmer" I said!).

I also use perl to automatically access web-pages and extract data, such as lists of addresses of local representatives of Insurance companies, which we can then download on our laptops and use if we are on the road and have no access to the webpages.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law