Excel’s Macro Recorder is a great place to start learning about macros, and we’ll do that in Excel Video 403. Watch how to start recording a macro from the Developer tab we added in Excel Video 402. You’ll see how to name the macro (make sure there are no spaces) and how to assign a keyboard shortcut to your macro to run it. Be careful. You can assign a macro keyboard shortcut that will override default Excel behavior. For example, if you assign ctrl+c to your macro, now your spreadsheet will run the macro instead of copying.
Another caution is to practice what you want to do once or twice before recording the macro. The macro will record everything you do, including mistakes, until you stop recording. The fewer mistakes you record, even if you fix the mistake in the recording, the fewer mistakes you have to watch every time the macro runs. The macro will be faster as well.
You’ll see how fast our macro fixes the Tuesday spreadsheet, but watch for the disaster when we get to Wednesday where the data looks different than Tuesday. The biggest problem is that after running the macro, we lost our ability to undo. We have work to do on our test macro, and we’ll starting working in the next Excel Video. I look forward to seeing you then.
