Macros

Macros are a facility in Office which allows you to ‘record' a series of editing actions, and store them for future use. These ‘recordings' can then be activated by clicking a tool, making a menu selection or typing a key sequence.

Step by step:

Select the Tools/Macro/Record new macro... menu option, thus:

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The following dialog box appears:

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First, name your macro. Keep it short (a single word - or Word will complain).

You can assign your macro to a toolbar (in which case you will need to choose a tool icon - more on this later) or to a keyboard shortcut (you will then need to choose which combination of keys to use - Word will offer suggestions).

This macro will be stored by default in the ‘Normal.dot' file - the file used by Word whenever it opens a new document. It is probably wise to leave this as is.

When you click the Toolbars button, you will see a list of available toolbars. Some will have been selected. We wish to create a NEW toolbar, called ‘Macros', so click the New... button, and enter the details as shown below.

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Click OK, and return to the ‘Commands' tab. The important thing to remember now, is to drag the ‘Commands' item onto the (empty) toolbar. It will appear on the toolbar as you can see - but this is hardly what we want. We'd like a nice little smiley face (or whatever...)

However, having done this, we notice that the ‘Modify Selection' button becomes active, so we can now click it.

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From the menu which now appears, we can

change the name of our macro to something a little more ‘friendly'
Set the style to ‘Default style' - important if we wish to have an icon on our tool button
And finally, select an icon for our button.

It is important to have a clear view of what we have done so far:

We have created a macro with no commands in it as yet, created a new toolbar with no tools in it, dragged our empty macro onto the toolbar and set some of the button properties.

Our macro, however, has not yet been recorded. This we do now...

When we have made all our changes, click the CLOSE button.

No, we are not terminating our macro creation prematurely - we are simply closing the ‘settings dialog box'. As soon as we click CLOSE, the macro starts recording our actions. You will see something like this on your screen:

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As you can see, our smiley button is in the toolbar, and the macro recorder is running.

NB The macro recorder does not record the time you spend thinking. It only records the actions you take. So take all the time you like.

The recorder has two buttons: STOP recording and PAUSE recording. Press the pause button if you need time to think and experiment. The start again when you are ready to proceed. Finally, press STOP.

Your macro has now been recorded, and your smiley face contains the full recording.

Unless you wish to leave the toolbar sitting in the middle of the screen, drag it into the toolbar area, and ‘dock' it.

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