Microsoft Excel Power

Lesson 1: The basics of Macros.

What is a macro?

A macro is just a series of statements which tell Excel what to do to your spreadsheet. But by using a macro, you can fully automate these activities, thus gaining a tremendous boost to your productivity. These instructions can be very simple and straightforward, or remarkably sophisticated and complex. But the idea is the same in that they perform the necessary steps to achieve your goal.

And that is perhaps the most important thing to think about, "What is your goal?" Unless you are sure of what you want to do with the spreadsheet, it is going to be difficult to write a macro to do it! So, the first part in any macro related exercise is to ensure that you plan out the steps to perform.

There is a danger (I fall into this all of the time) of over doing the automation, in that the time taken to create the macro far outweighs the benefits from its use. We will talk about what should be automated and what should be left to "by hand" as we go through the exercises.

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