Executive Summary
Business Overview
Recently it came time for me to buy my own first car. One of the biggest pains for me during this experience was that I didn’t know anything about cars. I knew some of the things that might be nice, which I had derived from the vehicle my father let me drive around, but I didn’t really know what a “good deal” was over a “junker”. In fact, it felt like a “good” car was only a couple thousand dollars away from costing just as much as a new car.
Desired Outcome
After spending multiple hours on the KSL.com auto classifieds, I thought about how convenient it would be to have each of the prices and some basic information about the quality of the car all visually in front of me in a graph. That way, I could see positive and negative outliers, trends, and average prices for a given set of vehicle characteristics.
Solution
I knew excel had the power to do it. I created a tool that accepts vehicle characteristics from a simple user form, scrapes live data off KSL.com/auto, and displays a graph to analyze the results. I wanted to make the input simple and easy to use, so I reduced the vehicle characteristics to the ones most pertinent to the majority of users. It also allows you to choose how the data will be graphically represented. Once you submit the information, a progress bar details which portion of the step is being performed so that it doesn’t seem like it’s not doing anything.
The result is two parts, the graphs you selected in the forms and the data in a table. With the data, you can click on a link to a specific car or create any other built-in excel graph. The graphs help visualize the prices of cars based on year and mileage. From there you can derive things such as how well a particular model holds value (trend line slope), which cars have low mileage for a decent price, or which cars appear to be over-utilized.
Solution (Excel workbook):
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