By: Philip Smith
1.1 Executive Summary
This project has been developed specifically to meet the needs of the College of Family, Home 
and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University (BYU). The dean of the college must annually evaluate the faculty members located within the college to make decisions regarding faculty awards, promotions, raises, and retention. The dean uses faculty productivity, which provides information on publications produced by each faculty member and department within the college, as one of the measures for evaluating faculty. The College of Family, Home and Social Sciences consists of the following departments: Anthropology; Economics; School of Family Life; Geography; History; Political Science; Psychology; Social Work; Sociology.
Information regarding faculty publications is tracked through the BYU Faculty Profile System database. Through this online database, authorized users are able to use generic queries to create summary reports in Microsoft Excel. These reports are insufficient to meet the needs of the dean for the purpose of evaluating faculty. Therefore, the dean requires these reports to be downloaded and modified into another format that can be used for evaluating faculty. I was responsible for doing this task over the past spring term—a time when I lacked knowledge of VBA and spent a significant amount of time performing repetitive manual tasks on reports for each of the departments listed above. I have written a program that will automate a significant amount of these repetitive tasks, leaving myself and those who perform the task after me with very few manual tasks to perform after the program has been executed. These remaining manual tasks require personal judgment on the part of the employee and therefore could not be automated.
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