Microsoft Office – The Basics of Macro Creation

Just to make it clear, the key word in all of this is Basic. The purpose of this post is to give the very base understanding of how to access the Visual Basic editor in the Office Suite applications that support it. Sadly, this means that OneNote is omitted as it can only be achieved with the use of a third-party Add-In or the Microsoft API. Both of which are out of the scope of this article.

Let’s get started. We can open the Visual Basic editor by simply holding down Ctrl + F11, but there are other useful buttons that we can make available directly in the applications. These buttons are on the Developer tab.

Making the Developer Tab visible

Making the Developer tab visible is the same across the Suite, except OneNote, as previously mentioned:

1. Open the Microsoft Office application, obviously;
2. Go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon:

3. Activate the tab by ticking the box, as shown above;
4. Click OK to return to the application window, you should now see a tab labelled Developer. Where it appears is dependent on what other Add-In’s you have installed.

Once you have repeated this for each of the Office Suite applications, you will notice some significant differences:

We won’t be diving too deeply into those differences in this article. Instead, we will be focusing on how to create a Macro using the Visual Basic editor, as it is the common method across all programs.

Now that the Developer tab is visible, let’s move on to creating our first Macro.