MTH785P: Programming for Business Analytics (Spring 2023)

Project 2
General Informa,on
This project involves wri4ng VBA code to automa4cally generate sales data into Excel from
an external database. It is worth 25% of your final mark in the module.

Submission and Due Date

You should submit your work online, via QMPlus, before 18:00 on 15 January 2024.

Your submission should include 2 files:

1. Project2.xlsm : An Excel workbook file. This should contain a VBA module as well as
buOons to call the relevant func4ons.
2. Project2Code.pdf : A pdf containing the code from your VBA module. You should copy
and paste from the VBA editor into an appropriate text editor (e.g. MS Word). Then,
ensure that the code forma8ng is correct and convert it to a PDF for submission.

In accordance with QMUL Academic Regula4ons (3.48.i) assignments that are submiOed late
without valid extenua4ng circumstances will be marked as follows:
For every period of 24 hours, or part thereof, that an assignment is overdue there
shall be a deduc:on of five per cent of the total marks available (i.e. five marks for an
assessment marked out of 100). ACer seven calendar days (168 hours or more late)
the mark shall be reduced to zero, and recorded as 0FL (zero, fail, late).

Plagiarism
All work you submit should be your own. In par4cular, you should not copy or submit
another student’s code or any code you find online without providing proper aOribu4on. All
cases of plagiarism will be pursued according under QMUL’s Academic Misconduct Policy.

General Requirements
• You should follow standard coding conven4ons: make sure your code is properly
indented, use informa4ve variable names, declare all variables, and provide
explanatory comments where necessary.
• Your Excel sheet should also adhere to best prac4ces for Excel development.
Important fixed ranges should be named so that names can be referenced in code.
• You should not submit code that does not compile. It is beOer to complete only part
of the project and submit clean code for this than to submit a full aOempt that does
not run at all because of compila4on errors.

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Project Overview
The goal of this project is to produce a small applica4on in Excel that queries a database and
automa4cally produces several worksheets containing sales data summaries for specified
periods.

Download the files Project2.xlsm and SalesData.accdb from QMPlus. The Excel workbook in
Project2.xslm has a sheet named Main. The inten4on is that a user can enter one row per
desired report in this sheet, star4ng at row 6 (under the column labels), including the name
of the report, a star4ng date, and an ending date in columns A, B, and C respec4vely. The
user should then be able to click a buOon to automa4cally connect to the given Access
database, retrieve a list of records for each date period given, and copy these records to a
new worksheet with the specified name. That is, the buOon should create one worksheet for
each row the user enters, containing the data for the period corresponding to this row.

Each such worksheet should contain (in column A) a list of dates star4ng at the given start
date and ending at the given end date. For each listed date, column B should show the total
value of the sales and profit across all orders from the database that were made on this
date. You will accomplish this by using an SQL query. For each desired report you should:

• Open a connec4on to the database.

• Create an appropriate SQL query to obtain the data for this report.
• Execute your query to obtain a recordset.
• Create a new worksheet, named according to the name in the specifica4on.
• Copy the records from the recordset into the new sheet.
• Format the data in the new sheet correctly.

An example of poten4al inputs and desired outputs are shown at the end of this document.

Project Details
The following ques4ons are designed to help walk you through what is required by wri4ng
several separate VBA func4ons. Your func4ons should all be placed in the module Main in
Project2.xlsm.

A helper func4on Open_Database_Connection is already provided there. This works

as described in lectures: it takes a string containing the path to the database, and returns an
ADODB.Connec4on object represen4ng a connec4on to this database. You should not
modify the func4on Open_Database_Connection.

1) Create a func4on CreateQueryCommand that takes no parameters and returns an

ADODB.Command object represen4ng the SQL query that returns sales and profit
data for all orders between these dates. You should create and add parameters to
the Command object for these dates.

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2) Create a subrou4ne CreateSheetFromRow that accepts 2 arguments: a Range
represen4ng one report specifica4on and an ADODB.Command object represen4ng
your parameterised query with an ac4ve connec4on to a database (that is, you
should assume that the ActiveConnection property has already been set for
this object). You may assume that the Range is 1 row by 4 columns, where the first
column is a sheet name, the second column is a star4ng date, and the third column is
an ending date, and the last is a cell that will indicate if there was an error during
prepara4on of the report (as in the Report Specifica4on area of the sheet).Your
subrou4ne should:
a. Set the values for the parameters in the ADODB.Command object.
b. Use the ADODB.Command object to execute its query and store the results in
an ADODB.Recordset.
c. Add a new sheet to the end of the workbook.
d. Copy the data from the recordset to this sheet star4ng at cell A3.
e. Format the sheet using your func4on from part 3 below.
f. Close the ADODB.Recordset object.

3) Write a func4on FormatSheet that takes a Worksheet object and a String

containing a name as an argument. The first argument will be a sheet created in part
2 above (i.e. with a recordset copied into it star4ng at A3). Your func4on should:
a. Insert an appropriate name for each column of data into the cells in row 2.
b. Insert the specified name into cell A1
c. Rename the sheet with the specified name.
d. Reformat the data from the recordset so that it displays correctly. This can be
done by seang the NumberFormat property of the appropriate ranges, as
follows:
• Set the Range’s NumberFormat to "dd/mm/yyyy" for date values.
• Set the Range’s NumberFormat to "$#,##0.00" for currency values.

4) Write a subrou4ne CreateReports that takes no arguments. Your subrou4ne

should first:
a. Create a database connec4on object of type ADODB.Connec4on, using the
provided helper func4on and the database path given by the user in the
sheet Main.
b. Use your func4on from part 1 to create an ADODB.Command object for our
query.
c. Set the Ac4veConnec4on property of the ADODB.Command object to your
newly opened connec4on.
Acer doing this, your func4on should then loop through the report specifica4ons
star4ng from row 6 in the Main sheet, and process each of them. This can be
accomplished calling your subrou4ne from part 2 and passing it an appropriate range
for row, together with the ADODB.Command object you have created. Your
subrou4ne should con4nue processing rows un4l it encounters a blank row. It should
then terminate, acer closing the database connec4on. You should create a buOon on
the sheet Main that the user can click to call this subrou4ne and generate all desired
reports.

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 5) There are many things that might go wrong: a user might give a bad sheet name, give
the same sheet name twice, give a bad path to the database, etc.
a. If there is an error in processing one specific row of Main, your error handler
should skip this row, and (if necessary) delete any worksheet that may have
been created for this row. You should then show a message to the user
indica4ng what the error was, and place “Error” in column D next to this row.
Acer doing this, your code should carry on processing the remaining rows.
b. If there is an error crea4ng the database connec4on, you should display a
message to the user and terminate without processing any rows.

6) Write a subrou4ne CleanUpSheets that takes no arguments. Your subrou4ne

should delete all sheets except for the sheet Main, and clear any cells in column D
that contain the text “Error”. Create a buOon on the sheet Main that the user can use
to call this subrou4ne.
When dele4ng worksheets here (and in the error handler for part 5), you should
temporarily set the Application.DisplayAlerts property appropriately to
ensure that the user is not prompted regarding the dele4on.

Marking Guidelines
Your project will be marked according to the following general scheme:
• 60% Correctness of all func4onality
• 20% Error handling
• 20% Style, including
o Correctly formaOed code
o Using informa4ve variable names
o Using good prac4ce when coding, including using named ranges in Excel
where appropriate
o Professional appearance of final project

If your project contains code which does not compile, it will receive at most a 50% so make
sure that your code does not contain any compila4on errors!

Part marks will be awarded in the case that you cannot implement all func4onality, but any
code that you do submit should be properly formaOed and free from any compilaGon
errors. If some code is repeatedly causing a compila4on error that you cannot figure out,
you can also comment this out and men4on the problem to show your work.

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Sample Screens
The following shows an example of what the sheet might look like acer a user has entered
report data. Five reports have been requested, with informa4on in rows 6-10 of the sheet.

When the user clicks the Generate Reports buOon, there should be 2 error prompts (one
acer another): the first because the date in cell C8 is not a valid date and the second
because slashes are not allowed in Excel sheet names, but there is one included in the name
in A10. The following examples were produced using Range.Address and some further
features of the MsgBox func4on. You may use any format you like, but you should give
some indica4on of what the problem was by using Err.Description or similar:

Acer these prompts are displayed the word “Error” should be inserted into column D for
these reports, as shown in the next screenshot:

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The remaining reports should have been generated successfully, and now appear as
separate worksheets:

These worksheets should appear as follows:

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At this point, the user can then click the Reset Form buOon, which should delete all
worksheets except for Main and also clear the “Error” text in column D

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