The thing about Excel is you can have the same old tasks to do day after day. Import some data, then format it to look like the data the previous day and the day before that, then create a chart, save it and print it out. It’s so familiar you can do it with your eyes shut but it does take up time and you are bored of it. Wouldn’t it be good if a robot could do it.

Well there is a way to automate it. In its simplest form you can just get Excel to remember the steps by just telling it to record what you are doing. You can then press a button or a shortcut key and it will do it all over again in a fraction of the time, like just a few seconds, although could be a a little less or more depending on how much you need to do. The nice thing is this works on both Windows and Mac.

This is what I show you how to do in the video below. Now you could make this more sophisticated by getting into the programming side of these macros using the program it uses to create it which is called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), it might sound daunting but it isn’t. But you can use it to create prompts, dialog boxes, messages and even do things depending on the data or values. It can do more and will be creating more videos for that but for now here is how to record a macro.