What's a macro and why should you care

Now, about that robotic vacuum I had: Perhaps I expected more than I should have from it. Perhaps the fact that the company advertised it as a "robot" made me think it could do more than just go in circles and further neuroticize my dog. Perhaps I expected it to act like a macro.

A macro is the shortcut of all shortcuts, it's an "I'm at your command" genie, it's a pattern or rule, and it's the good kind of computer gremlin. A macro is a little computer program that you — yes YOU with no computer development knowledge — can create to make your computing life easier and more efficient. Simply put, a macro is a bunch of commands grouped together as a single command that are recorded and saved under a short key code or macro name.

You can create a macro to do just about anything—to add blocks of text that you know you will need again and again in a document, to insert and format a table in Excel, and even to group objects together in Visio. Anything that you need to repeat can be recorded as a macro, saving you both time and the possibility of making a mistake.

For example, if you know that you will often use a highly stylized list, comprised of colored balls on the first level, tiny images of yourself on the second, and just an indent on the third level, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to insert this list; you only have to create it once. You use something called a macro recorder, which works very much like a tape recorder: You basically record every keystroke, every button click, every command that you need to do in order to accomplish this one task, so that the next time you need to do this possibly complex set of actions, the macro will just repeat back what it observed. It's like a monkey. Or a parrot. Or your three-year-old who repeats to his teacher everything that you've muttered under your breath to the slowpoke in front of you who hasn't the decency to even drive the speed limit during your commute to preschool that day.

You can create the very simple to the very complex macros; you just do what works for you and the task at hand.

The Excel training course Get in the loop with macros is a great place to start looking into macros, and there are a TON of other resources on the Office.com web site. Do a general search for "macros" and then whittle down the results to the program(s) you're interested in creating macros for. And once you do, I'd like to know what you came up with so maybe share them with the rest of the blog readers. A macro bared is a macro shared.

"Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience." — Hyman Rickover

—  Crabby