How do macros work in excel

Best Excel Shortcuts. Conditional Formatting. Creating a Pivot Table. Excel Tables. Creating a Drop Down List. Recording a Macro. Click OK , and open up that tab in the main window. Keep in mind that there are already a lot of Ctrl-based shortcuts, so try not to overwrite any of those that you use regularly. You can also choose to save the macro in one of three places: the current workbook, a new workbook, or your personal macro workbooks. Your personal macro workbook personal. But if you think you may want to reuse that macro on another workbook, keep it in your personal macro workbook for easier access.

All we need to do is click Record Macro , take those actions, and then click Stop Recording. The Stop Recording button replaces the Record Macro button when you start recording. Just hit record, take some actions, and then stop recording. First, you can run it from the Ribbon. Click that button to see your macros.

Just select it and hit Run. To learn more about creating macros, see Create or delete a macro. To learn about how to run a macro, see Run a macro. Make sure the Developer tab is visible on the ribbon. By default, the Developer tab is not visible, so do the following:.

On the Developer tab, in the Code group, click Stop Recording. To edit a macro, in the Developer tab, click Macros , select the name of the macro, and click Edit.

You can always ask an expert in the Excel Tech Community or get support in the Answers community. Before you record a macro Macros and VBA tools can be found on the Developer tab, which is hidden by default, so the first step is to enable it. On the Developer tab, click Stop Recording. Take a closer look at the macro You can learn a little about the Visual Basic programming language by editing a macro.

Next steps To learn more about creating macros, see Create or delete a macro. Before you record a macro Make sure the Developer tab is visible on the ribbon. Record a macro On the Developer tab, click Record Macro.

If you have a lot of worksheets in a workbook and you want to protect all the sheets, you can use this macro code. It allows you to specify the password within the code. You will need this password to unprotect the worksheet. If you have some or all of the worksheets protected, you can just use a slight modification of the code used to protect sheets to unprotect it.

Note that the password needs to the same that has been used to lock the worksheets. While it does the work, when cells are merged you will not be able to sort the data. In case you are working with a worksheet with merged cells, use the code below to unmerge all the merged cells at one go. A lot of time, you may need to create versions of your work. These are quite helpful in long projects where you work with a file over time. Using timestamps will allow you to go back to a certain file to see what changes were made or what data was used.

You need to specify the folder location where you want to save the file. You can specify something related to your project or company. If you work with data for different years or divisions or products, you may have the need to save different worksheets as PDF files. In the above code, I have specified the address of the folder location in which I want to save the PDFs. Also, each PDF will get the same name as that of the worksheet. Use this code when you have a worksheet that contains a lot of formulas and you want to convert these formulas to values.

Here is the code that will lock all the cells that have formulas, while all the other cells are not locked. In case you want to unprotect all the worksheets, use ws.

Unprotect instead of ws. Protect in the code. Similarly, you can modify this code to insert a blank column after every column in the selected range. For example, you may want to track activities such as when was a particular expense incurred, what time did the sale invoice was created, when was the data entry done in a cell, when was the report last updated, etc. Use this code to insert a date and time stamp in the adjacent cell when an entry is made or the existing contents are edited.

Note that you need to insert this code in the worksheet code window and not the in module code window as we have done in other Excel macro examples so far. To do this, in the VB Editor, double click on the sheet name on which you want this functionality. Also, this code is made to work when the data entry is done in Column A note that the code has the line Target.

You can change this accordingly. Highlighting alternate rows can increase the readability of your data tremendously. This can be useful when you need to take a print out and go through the data. Note that I have specified the color as vbCyan in the code. You can specify other colors as well such as vbRed, vbGreen, vbBlue.