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

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Deal Finder

Executive Summary

Three years ago, a good friend showed me a website that would forever change the way I shopped online: dealnews.com. This is a website dedicated to scowering the internet in search of the best deals and lists them according to “hotness” (rating system for how good the deal is, from 1-lowest to 5-highest). Here, you’ll find deals ranging from 80% off clearance at Kohls.com to a free Panda Express entrĂ©e, and everything in between.

The purpose of project deal finder was to go one more step from what dealnews.com does. For years, it became part of my morning routine to go to dealnews.com and scan the new deals for the day; however, as of late, I’ve noticed my days have been so busy that I often don’t have time for my online deal fix. Project deal finder does what I now cannot – search for the best deals that I care about and publish them in a way that I can quickly look at them. Essentially, deal finder scans dealnews.com’s 300 daily deals and filters them according to keywords that I set. If deal finder finds a keyword match on a deal that has a “Hotness” above my threshold, it sends me a message – either via text or email. Now I can focus on my studies while deal finder is on the lookout for the best online deals that matter to me.

Inputs & Outputs

A simple form interface is used to create, edit, and remove search entries.  A search entry consists of a user's name, either their phone number and carrier (if they want to receive the deals via text) or their email address (to receive deals via email), and the search information (keywords to search for and the minimum level of hotness allowed).

A large and hard-to-miss "Run" button is located on the main worksheet. Once the user clicks "Run", deal finder takes care of the rest. If it finds a matching deal, it'll send the user the message with the deal's description and link that goes directly to the online deal.

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