Microsoft Excel: Short Introduction to Macros
Microsoft Excel makes it easy for individuals to perform arithmetic functions and get accurate results faster than manually performing the computations. With Microsoft Excel, entering a series of formulas and formatting the cells are easy – but if it’s a repetitive process, it gets really annoying especially if there are some formulas you’ve overlooked. And because Microsoft Excel remains the most powerful business tool available, there are different methods and functionalities that help you avoid these mistakes over and over again – using macros is considered as one of these perfect functionalities.
Macros are defined as a series of actions performed in Microsoft Excel. These series of actions may include keyboard strokes, mouse clicks and formatting options. If you’re formatting an invoice sheet and you’re doing the same thing twice a month, sometimes, copy + paste fails and entering these formulas one by one is dragging. This is where macros play a very essential role. With these, you don’t have to enter the same formulas or commit a couple of mistakes due to carelessness. You don’t have to copy the previous worksheet and paste it to your new one and edit the new copy afterwards. Usually, this takes more time than you could have imagined it to be. If you’re using Microsoft Excel for quite some time without knowing what these useful codes are, you haven’t expanded and seen the complete capabilities of Microsoft Excel. Manually formatting the cells and performing the same arithmetic functions are still faster than manually performing the computations. Nonetheless, why settle for something that consumes your time, when there is a feature that allows you to do these things with a simple mouse click and/or keyboard taps?
Microsoft Excel’s macros functionality is unfortunately, not very familiar to simple Excel users. This is why this article’s aim is to make sure that people will make use of macro and enjoy the functionalities that are given to every Microsoft Excel user. At first, the use of the codes can sound very complicated. Some people are not even aware on what it actually does, and may be confusing to some. Everything would seem difficult at first. But once you’ve gotten to know its primary functions, you’ll benefit from it, whatever your applications are.
Large and small companies have tons of spreadsheets. But regardless of the number of sheets that are being done on a regular basis, most of these sheets have one formatting, formula and arithmetic functions. If you’re doing these sheets and working on them using macros, you can save 80% of your time – if you’re even used to using macros, all these formatting tools and options can be done within a couple of minutes or even less. All that it takes is a simple shortcut key to perform these commands. Don’t forget to record and save what you have done to make sure that everything will perfectly work out. Today, Microsoft Excel also has some debugging tools which allow you to check the errors and find out some of the things that you have done wrong. This, now, will be for the advanced users. For beginners, what is important is to make a simple repetitive task easy and convenient. Macros are the answer to this objective.
