Microsoft Word Tutorials

Step-by-Step For Everyday Microsoft Word Macros Productivity

Apart from typing word documents, Microsoft has a lot of other interesting features that help a professional with his more complicated word processing and document formatting needs. A Macro is one such feature. In Microsoft Word, macros automate a series of tasks that you perform on different types of documents on a regular basis. Putting it simply, macros are a series of commands that is recorded so it can be played back or executed later on. For example, let us say that a university professor receives a lot of submitted papers and reports from his students. He can choose to reformat each document by hand, but that would take an enormous amount of time. With a more in-depth MS Word training, he can instead opt to use a Word macro to edit his students papers on his computer. Macros can enable him to set margins, reformat and style text, remove inappropriate return characters, set the font size and a variety of other tasks without having to touch a single hardcopy. It's a great time-saver!

To use macros you must first use the record macro function. To access it, choose Tools Macro Record New Macro. In the Record Macro dialog that appears, give your macro a one-word alphanumeric name and - if you want - a description, then in the Store Macro In pop-up menu, indicate whether you want that macro to be applicable to only your currently open document or to all documents. You can also assign your macro to a keyboard shortcut or to a toolbar. Now this is important: if a keyboard shortcut is already assigned to the combination you choose for your macro, it will appear in the "Currently assigned to" field. There are over 950 commands in Word, most of which are on menus and toolbars and have shortcut keys assigned to them. Some of these commands, however, are not assigned to menus or toolbars by default. Before you create your own Word macro, you should check to see if it already exists and can be assigned to a toolbar.

All you need to do now is click the OK button; a miniscule Stop Recording toolbar will appear, and your recording will begin. Word will keep track of every task you perform from changing fonts to aligning margins and every keystroke you make until you click the stop button on the Stop Recording toolbar. When you do, the toolbar vanishes and Word saves your macro. That is how simple it is to make a macro.

To run your new Microsoft Word macro, open the document you want to apply it to, then choose Tools Macro Macros. Find your macro in the list, select it, click Run, if you assigned a keyboard shortcut to your macro, all you need to do is press that key combination. Another way of accessing the Macros dialog box is to use the Alt + F8 shortcut key.