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

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Bank Account Balances, SpringerLink Books, and Historical S&P 500 Futures Data

As a frugal saver and rate shopper, I have opened accounts at various financial institutions. The time it takes to keep track of the various passwords and to login to the accounts is time consuming and annoying when you could be doing something better like watching BYU football or the Jimmer show. This project attempts to alleviate that unneeded stress by automating the process of going to the account and retrieving the current balance in the case of banking and brokerage account, and in the case of the credit card accounts it retrieves the most recent statement’s balance. This program interacts with American Express, ING Direct, Vanguard, Zions, iGO banking, Bank of America (credit card), Scottrade, and the 401(k) through Wells Fargo. The functionality makes this process seamless so that the user can do all of this by just the click of the button, no more entering passwords and user IDs.

In addition to the macros created to serve some financial purposes, another macro was created to aid in downloading books through the SpringerLink database offered at BYU. Once the URL of where the book’s webpage is copied (Ctrl + c), then the user initiates the command and follows the prompts to enter the URL, net ID, and password enabling the macro to proceed in downloading all of the chapters and naming them appropriately, all while numbering the chapters to help keep them in order.

Just on the side, there is also a macro that retrieves futures information of the S&P 500 front month beginning with April of 1982 and ending with the most recent closed day.

Write Up

Excel File

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