The most important step in creating effective Word macros is careful planning. While it might seem a bit obvious, you should have a clear idea of what you want the Word macro to perform, how it will make your future work easier, and the circumstances under which you intend to use it. Otherwise, you may end up spending time creating an ineffective macro that you won’t use.

The purpose behind creating macros in Word is to speed up your work by putting repetitive tasks and complex sequences of commands at your fingertips. What could take literally hours to do manually only takes a few seconds with the click of a button. Of course, if you’ve created a lot of macros, searching through the Macros dialog box will eat up a lot of the time you save. If you assign your macros a shortcut key, however, you can bypass the dialog box and access your macro directly from the keyboard – the same way you can use shortcut keys to access other commands in Word.

For many Word users, the term macro strikes fear in their heart, mainly because they do not fully understand Word macros and have most likely never created their own. Fortunately, creating and running macros isn’t too difficult, and the resulting efficiency is well worth the time spent learning to use them.

If you’ve planned your macro carefully enough, recording it for later use will be the easiest part of the process. It is so easy, in fact, that the only difference between creating a macro and working on the document is that you have to press a few extra buttons and make a couple of selections in dialog boxes.