Okay, so what are macros? Macros just are a series of actions in an application. Now notice, I'm using the words an application even though we are in Excel here, and obviously we are focused very much on Excel macros, it's worth knowing that macros can apply to a number of different applications.

So, this series of actions in an application that we record and then play back and repeat when we want to do the same job again, so it saves us doing repetitive tasks. So, VBA or Visual Basic for Applications is the programming language that those series of recorded actions get stored in, and we'll look at how those get stored and where they get stored a little bit later on in the session. So those two important bits of information we need to know about macros and VBA. There are also a couple of settings that I'd like to draw your attention to, to make our lives easier when we are working with macros. The first one is that we should have the Developer ribbon turned on. So you can see here, if you look at my ribbon selection at the top, I have the Developer ribbon turned on. If it wasn't there, then to turn it on you simply right click over any of the ribbon areas, go to Customize the Ribbon, and then on the right hand side scroll down the list of available ribbons and you'll find the Developer ribbon. And if you don't have it visible you'll see it's unchecked here, and if you do have it visible, it will be checked here. So all you need to do is tick it, click Okay, and then the Developer ribbon will be turned on for you. The second thing that we need to check is down on the status bar next to where I have the Ready message or the Status message, you should have a little button. Now, if you do have this little macro button here, that's fantastic. If you don't, to turn it on, right click over the Status bar and just come up to the Macro Recording option here and you'll see that there's a little tick next to mine, indicating that mine is turned on, if I click it once it'll turn off and the button disappears. If I tick it again, it'll come back and we've got our button. So, you just make sure that those two things are enabled. So we have the Macro Recording button down at the bottom of the Status bar and we have our Developer ribbon turned on at the top.