This morning I was putting the final touches on the VBA code. When I finally got it to work to my satisfaction, I started on the final task of writing up explicit instructions and making sure it would be truly reproducible. To do this, I saved my VBA code and tried to load it into the other Access data set we have (the eighteen month data). Whenever I did anything I documented it in a text file, complete with screen shots of important steps. Of course, when working with this I realized other little things that you have to set and conform correctly for the program to work, so it was helpful that I did this reproducibility test before handing it off to Matthew. Also, I decided to add a bit more functionality to it that I had overlooked before. Testing on the 18-month data takes quite a bit longer though since even just saving the Access database onto my laptop took a good amount of time. After final tweaks, I got it to work! This means my work is truly reproducible and should be a really helpful tool for King County Metro when making projections in the future. To see my pdf with the instructions, you can look here, or if you're really curious about what the monster VBA code looked like in the end you can check that out here. For those of you that are just interested in the pretty projections that it made in the end, you can see one example below.
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This whole project with the projections was a great example for me in how difficult it can be to automate a process or make your work reproducible. I am now so grateful for the point and click GUIs that the Microsoft suite along with all other applications provide. I also learned that VBA can be a powerful tool and really helpful for automating long processes, but the code can be incredibly hard to deal with and frustrating.