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In this video we're going to cover how to record a macro which is a very helpful tool when trying to

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quickly automate simple processes or when trying to find the right terminology to accomplish something

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in VBA to start we need to be on the developer tab of the ribbon under the code section.

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Go ahead and click on record macro.

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Now what recording a macro essentially does is record all of your clicks and interactions with Excel.

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And it turns them into a macro for you to run again in the future to execute those same actions.

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We'll go through an example of that shortly but first let's talk about this window that pops up.

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You have the option to enter a name so we'll go ahead and put recorded macro like so and this name will

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actually give us an error message but we'll talk about that in a minute.

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The shortcut key can be used to tie your macro to a combination of keys on your keyboard to run quickly

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and automatically the store macro dropdown is mainly intended for multiple workbooks being open at the

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same time so we can ignore that for now.

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Lastly you have the option to put a description of your macro in and that's to help other users know

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what this macro does without having to look at and understand the code.

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So let's go ahead and click ok and we see we get an error message that pops up their message says the

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syntax of the name is incorrect.

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In our case it's because we put a space in the middle of the name.

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Generally speaking it's best practice when coding to avoid unnecessary spaces and instead replace them

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with underscores.

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And there are several reasons for this which will be made clear in the details of coding and VBA.

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For now click OK.

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And change the name to recorded underscore macro

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and go ahead and click ok.

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Now we can see up here the record macros Button has actually turned into a stop recording button and

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that's where you'll go to click when you're done doing all of your actions and completing your macro

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to just give an example of what this might look like.

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Go ahead and click into any cell and type a click out of that so click back into that cell.

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Go to home and give it some sort of formatting whatever color whatever sized text whatever background

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color you'd like.

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Then go back to developer and click stop recording.

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Now if we click on our macros button here we can see we have a recorded macro that's showing up go ahead

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and close out of that and let's go take a look at what the macro actually looks like in order to do

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that on your developer tab click on the Visual Basic button to pull up the Visual Basic window under

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the modules folder in your project Explorer window you should see a module one double click on this

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to open it and we can see here this is our recorded macro.

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Now I'm not going to walk through the details of what each of these lines mean we'll cover the details

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of all of VBA and feature videos but to give you a general idea these lines selected the cell and made

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its value a these lines changed the background color of that cell to be yellow these lines changed the

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font to be red and these lines increased the size of that font and this end sub means that's the end

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of this particular macro.

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So just to give an example of what running this macro might look like.

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Go ahead and exit out of your VBA window Let's insert a new sheet down here under macros select recorded

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macro and click Run and we can see the system copied all of the actions that we had done previously

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on sheet 1 and did the same thing on this new sheet sheet too.

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So this was a very simplified example of when you might be able to use record macro but you should have

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a good idea now of how to use this tool to either get the terminology you need to accomplish something

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in VBA or to record a series of relatively simple small steps and try to automate your processes.