Why use macros?

To automate repetitive tasks, you can quickly record a macro in Excel 2007 so that you don't have to repeat the same set of commands or steps over and over and over. So this is a real timesaver, especially if you're going to be doing this often to the same worksheet or sets of workbooks. Now, to set up or to record a macro, you need to set up Excel to allow you to see the Developers tab. Now there's different ways that you could record macros in Excel, and again, because we're working in the essential things that you need to know about Excel, we're going to use the simplest way of doing that. And that's to record our movements on the screen.

First of all though, we need to see the Developers tab, which is not visible at the moment. So what we have to do is we need to go up to our Microsoft Office button and select it, and go back over to our Excel options button that we were looking at at the very beginning of our set of movies. And in doing that, on our very first screen here, we are going to enable the Show Developer tab in the ribbon. So I want you to select that and then click OK. So now when you come back to your screen, you're going to see your Developer tab available to you. Now let's click on that and explore that for just a moment.

You'll see that you have three groupings here. You've got Code, Controls and XML. Obviously Controls and XML are something that we're not going to explore at all here. And even in our codes area, we're only going to explore the macros, and the automated macros area. So what we're going to learn is we're going to learn how to record a macro. And each of the commands that you perform will be saved in the macro so that you can play them back again. What we're going to do is we're going to learn how to insert two rows and put a little bit of a table heading on our screen, right in front of us. So again, you need to have the Developer tab visible in order to use this particular feature of Microsoft 2007, and you'll do that by clicking on the Office button, going to your options, and making sure the Developer tab ribbon is showing and been selected.

In our next movie, I'll show you how you can create and record a macro.