Continuing on with our “What’s inside Excel Everest?” series, which showcases the introductory, “Why is this important?” paragraphs found within Excel Everest Excel tutorial.

…why is it important to learn?…

Basic macros

Macros bring Excel to life. Want to see how? Simply go to the index page of this tutorial and hit the fun button in the top right. See, Excel is alive! But don’t worry, they can be used for much more practical purposes than that. Macros are able to do repetitive operations for you and manipulate data and control Excel in a way that normal Excel functions wouldn’t allow. They are essentially instructions given to Excel to do certain things written in a simple programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). With VBA, you give Excel operations to perform in the form of written instructions, and it does so, at light speed! For instance, the stars you see in the fun button macro on the index page are really just Excel putting the “*” character in and out of the cells (randomly). And then the bear coming across the screen is just VBA telling Excel to move that object to a certain position and then switch to another. Macros can get highly complicated but it’s important to understand what they are as well as to have a handle on how to record your very own. Let’s look at how to do this.

Note that for this topic, you need to have the “Developer” tab visible in your ribbon. If you don’t see it, click on the round button, go to Excel options, and then, under popular, hit “show developer tab in ribbon”.