BYUSA Blue Crew Email Processing

Executive Summary: BYUSA Blue Crew Email Processing

By: Matthew Sheets

Business Overview: An Introduction to BYUSA Blue Crew

For this project, I choose to do a little volunteer work for an old mission companion, Bryon Anderson. Here’s currently serving with BYUSA Blue Crew and requested my help with a project a little earlier this semester. BYUSA Blue Crew is an organization devoted to providing BYU students with an opportunity to get involved by volunteering at whatever events student leaders may need help with. BYUSA is BYU’s student service organization and is similar to student governments at other universities although there are a few differences.

Problem Description: Email Processing

For some time now, Bryon and others involved with BYUSA Blue Crew have had to do a lot of monotonous work to keep their hefty email list regularly updated. This involves downloading new changes from the internet, formatting those changes into a .txt file, making some changes to the text so that their bulk mailer can correctly process the information, and then uploading it to Listserv (Listserv is a bulk emailing service used by a number of organizations on campus to communicate with student participants).

Implementation Documentation: Process and Solution Descriptions

After going through the process with Bryon and determining what parts could be most aided by automation, I determined that the most helpful part would be helping with automating the formatting portion of the email list creation process, especially after reviewing the steps necessary to download and upload the list automatically and realizing that it likely wasn’t possible using the techniques we learned with the VBA browser.

The completed result consisted of a simple workbook with a number of items on the ribbon for easily processing a saved file. I also included buttons with easy links to the websites necessary for uploading and downloading updates.

Discussion of Learning: What I l Learned Doing This

I feel like overall there was a lot that I learned completing this project. I split it into two groups: (1) principles and (2) particulars. The first group covers overarching principles that I feel I came to better understand while completing this project, things that could apply generally to any coding project, regardless of language, problem, or logic. The second group describes briefly the particular pieces of programming that I needed learn to complete the project, some of which I may not have fully implemented or completed learning, but at least touched on during the progress of the project. Please see the attached document for further detail on these two areas.

Overall, I thought that the project was a great one for learning how to work with folders, to create and reuse methods, to work with workbooks, files, and folders and to just gain confidence throughout the entire process. Thanks again for the project, Dr. Allen! 

• http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/msheets/BlueCrewEmailProcessor.xlsm
• http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/msheets/MatthewSheetsBYUSABlueCrewWriteup.pdf
• http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/msheets/EMAIL_PROCESSING--DO_NOT_ALTER.zip