EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
When seeking an appropriate project for this final
assignment, I solicited my past professors from last semester asking if there
was something that they wish was automated in their daily work. Every professor that I emailed replied to me
with a potential project that would help them.
Unfortunately, I was only able to select one for one of the MBA finance
professors, Grant McQueen1
Professor McQueen has been tracking the economic recovery of
the US after the 2009 financial meltdown.
He makes presentations on the data including, US unemployment rates,
regularly using a PowerPoint presentation.
Each time he presents his findings he has to pull data from the Federal
Reserve Economic Data (FRED) website into excel, create several charts and put
these charts into his PowerPoint slide deck.
This process takes about 2 hours.
Professor McQueen asked me to automate this process. I was successful in creating a VBA tool that
reduces the processing time down to 60 seconds.
My Tools automates the process using 4 sub procedures:
1)
getData() – Pulls data from the FRED website
using the Professor Allen’s agent module and inputs the data into an excel
worksheet
2)
user() – the checks who the user is and which
API Key to use.
3)
MakeCharts() – Creates 4 charts of unemployment
data
4)
ChartsAndTitlesToPresentation() – Exports the
charts into an existing PowerPoint presentation
This project has increased my comfort level with the topics
covered in class, but it has also exposed me to several other topics not
covered in class specifically:
1)
Application Programming interface (API) keys
2)
Manipulating other Microsoft Office applications
other than excel using VBA
1 I was able to
leverage the interest from all of the professors to land a paid VBA consulting
project with the director of the MBA program, John Bingham.
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14w/dkt7/David_Toronto_Final_Project_Report_Rev1.pdf (Updated Learning outcomes section)
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