Suiting Up Excel For Macros

Tired of doing repetitive tasks in Excel? Expect life to be much easier? Ever wondered how can you automate important stuff that bores you to death when done again and again? All this, and more, made possible with Microsoft's own Excel Macros. Here is a series of tutorials on Automating your tasks using Macros. First in this series comes Suiting Up Excel for Macros, a post that will teach you how to set up the magical Macro Land... Enjoy!

If you are using Microsoft Excel 2010:

Open a new Microsoft Excel 2010 workbook.  

If you find the Developer tab in your Ribbon, part of your job is already done. If not:

Go to File Menu and Click on Options in the leftmost pane

The Excel Options Dialog box will be displayed. Click on Customize Ribbon in the leftmost Pane

Check the DEVELOPER check box on the rightmost pane and click on OK.

 

You will now find the developer tab on your home screen:

 

If you are using Microsoft Excel 2007:

 Click on the Office Button at the top left corner and click on Excel Options

The Excel Options Dialog Box will be displayed. Check the ‘Show Developer tab in the Ribbon’ and click OK

A Macro is just VBA code embedded in Excel. So it is important that you handle all .xlsm files with utmost care, unless you trust its source. The safest possible settings for Macro Security would be to get notified when active content exists in a file, and then select whether you would like to enable it. That can be done by the Macro Security button in the Developer tab

Click on Macro Security, the Trust Center dialog box will be displayed.

Select the second radio button, which will ‘Disable all Macros with Notification’ and click OK

You are now all set to write/ record some Macros to ease your job!