Developing Macro Commands in MS Excel
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In Microsoft Excel, repetitive and lengthy tasks significantly affect office productivity. For example, if you are assigned to do a spreadsheet analysis that requires manually performing repetitive operations such as copy and paste, sort, etc., this can take up a lot of your time. Fortunately, Excel macros can cut that time significantly.
Anyway, what is an Excel macro?
Macros are sets of instructions you give to the computer. Instead of doing the task yourself, you are asking Excel to do that job for you. To create macros, you need to provide Excel with instructions.
With macros, very long and complicated jobs can appear to be very simple and easy. This increases your efficiency as an office worker, engineer or even data analyst.
Security Issues and Requirements
To make this tutorial appealing to the majority of Excel users around the world, I am focusing on MS Excel 2002. However, if you are using a more advanced version such as Excel 2007, this tutorial also applies to you, since they have very similar features.
Excel macros deal with Visual Basic scripting, which has a history of security issues such as viruses. To make your computing environment secure before we start this tutorial, you need to take two very important precautionary measures.
First, use only trusted macros. You can't just use any macros from persons you do not know or download anything from the Internet. Make sure you double check it, and that it is coming only from your trusted macro developers.
Second, there will be times when security errors get displayed when you open the Excel workbook. This is due to the security level being used by the workbook. In order to adjust this, go to Tools -> Options -> Macro Security, and then under Security Level, set it to either “Medium” or “Low.”
Note that running a “Low” level of security is advisable only if you use files locally and are not mixing any macros from other untrusted developers. You should also make sure you have anti-virus software installed on your computer. However, to completely ignore all macro-related security errors, set it to “Low,” save the workbook, close Excel and open it again. Or if you happen to reopen your workbook with macros in it, just click “Enable Macros,” assuming you have already set the Macro Security Level to “Medium.”
Next: Macro Recorder >>
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