What is a Word Macro

11/1/2021

What is a Word Macro: Macro baby steps part ii

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Recording your own macros

In What is a Word Macro: Macro baby steps part i, I promised that I would show you how to record your own macro. In Word, macros are accessed via the Developer tab (read Where is the developer tab? if you can't find it) or the View tab, which you can find here:

If you click on the little 'down' arrow, you get options to 'View Macros' or 'Record Macro':

Click on 'Record Macro' to get a pop-up box which looks like this:

MThis box allows you to name your macro, assign it to a button on the Quick-Access Toolbar and/or give it a keyboard shortcut.* Feel free to play with all these options, but you can access them all once you have got your macro working so you can ignore them for now. When you click on ‘OK’ you will be recording your macro. This means that Word will record every keystroke and click you make in the macro so you need to plan what you are going to do!

Once you have a plan, click ‘OK’ and start recording your macro. Your mouse pointer will change to an arrow with a cassette tape to remind you that you are recording. When you have finished, press ‘Stop recording’ (located in the same place as ‘Record Macro’). If you need the macro to select any text, you need to make the selection using the keyboard as Word doesn’t register text selected using the mouse.

Here are the instructions for the two little macros I mentioned in Macro baby steps part i, just to give you some examples.

Convert text to small caps

Click ‘Record Macro’.
Bring up the Font menu (using CTRL+D or by clicking on the arrow at the bottom left of ‘Font’ on the Home tab).
Select ‘Small caps’ and click ‘OK’.
Click ‘Stop recording’.

Change ‘asthma patients’ to ‘patients with asthma’:

Select ‘asthma’.
Click ‘Record Macro’.
Use CTRL-X to ‘cut’ ‘asthma’.
Skip over ‘patients’ using CTRL+→.
Type ‘with ’.
Paste ‘asthma’.
Click ‘Stop recording’.

how to run your new macro

To run your macro, go back to the macros menu, and click on ‘View Macros’. Select your macro (if this is the first macro you have recorded or installed, it will be called ‘Macro1’**). Click on Run.

Hopefully, your macro will run just as you planned, but if it doesn’t, it is possible to edit it, which you can do by clicking on 'Edit'.

(For the two example macros above, you will need to have selected a word before you run the macro otherwise either nothing happens or you will get an error message.)

But ... clicking on ‘Edit macro’ opens up the macro in the Visual Basic editor, which looks pretty scary when you first see it … so I talk about that in my How to edit a macro post.

Now you have a macro to help you with your editing, it would be useful to be able to use it quickly and without thinking about it too much. What is a Word Macro: Macro baby steps part iii shows you how to do this.

*This box also asks you where you want to store your macro: if you choose the default option of ‘All Documents (Normal.dotm)’ you will be able to use your macro every time you use Word. You can add a description of your macro in the space at the bottom to remind you of what it does (but, again, you can sort this out later).
**Once you are more confident and are recording macros you plan to keep and use in your editing, you do need to name each macro (no spaces allowed!) and give it a description so that you remember what it does. You don't need a macro list that looks like this:

Author

Andrea at Yours Truleigh Editing.
www.yourstruleighediting.com