These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Monday, November 22, 2010

Executive Summary: Talent Acquisition Reporting Tools

My project is for my employer (will remain confidential). The purpose of my project is to create a tool that takes information from two separate reports and creates 1) a RPM report. The RPM report does varies vlookups, filters, column shifts, and pivot tables, then creates a report to be used by recruiters in the XX sector at XX company to monitor daily recruiting activities. The report is also used by hiring managers and directors of various functions within XX sector to reduce the length of time between candidate submission and start date.
2) using the function button, this will do similar activities, but separate out reports specific to each function within the XX sector. These reports will be saved to the hard-coded directory. Reports are used by the VP of XX in the XX sector and his subordinate hiring managers to track candidates and high-profile engineers for "special" projects.

Competitive Scraping, Amazon.com

Executive Summary

I currently work for Overstock.com, a major internet retailer. Our main competitor is Amazon.com, and we have many different methods of trying to keep current on Amazon.com's prices. Our philosophy at Overstock.com is that we want to be know as the internet's low price leader. As such, when aware that we are selling the same product at a higher price than Amazon.com, we lower the price or drop the product. That way consumers can have confidence that when they have found what they want on our website, that we will have lowest price. We currently have a team of 5 full-time employees whose sole job function is keep our database of Amazon.com information current. When I asked my boss for ideas about this project, he said it would be really useful if I could write a macro where we could feed it Amazon Stock Identification Numbers (ASINs) and it would bring back the name, current pricing, current shipping, and total current cost for that item. As requested, I did just that. Both my direct boss and his boss have tested this macro, and found it to exceed their expectations. We are excited to implement it as a tool that will save Overstock.com both time and money.

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/cmarsh/VBA_write_up.pdf

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/cmarsh/ASINmacro.xlsm