Microsoft Excel Tips
and Tricks
Give Your Excel Workbooks a Consistent, Professional Look
Most of my company's work for clients is done in
Microsoft Excel. To maintain a consistent and professional
look in the documents we send them, we created a macro that
automatically formats our workbooks with certain elements.
Among other things, our macro sets the page layout to
landscape, specifies the page margins, and adds standard
elements such as copyright information and page numbers to
page headers and footers.
Identifying repetitive tasks and recording them as macros
saves us a lot of time, helps to maintain consistency, and
reduces mistakes.
The following procedure demonstrates how to create a macro
you can use to insert a custom footer into your documents.
To create the macro:
1.
Open a new Excel workbook.
2.
On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then
click Record New Macro.
3.
In the Macro name text box, type the name for the
macro, such as FormatPage.
4.
In the Store macro in list, select Personal Macro
Workbook. (Note: You must save the macro in your
Personal Macro Workbook, or it will be lost.)
5.
Click OK.
6.
On the View menu, click Header and Footer.
7.
Click the Custom Footer button.
8.
Click in the Left section, Center section, or
Right section box, and then click the buttons to
insert the header or footer information you want in that
section; or, type in your own information.
9.
Click the Font button (the button with a large A) to
change the font attributes.
10.
Click OK.
11.
On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then
click Stop Recording.
To use the macro in a new document:
1.
Open a document.
2.
On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then
click Macros.
3.
In the Macro name box, click the name of the macro
you want to run.
4.
Click Run.
To view your results, click Print Preview on the
Standard toolbar.
Editor's Note:
To use Print Preview, you must have filled in at
least one cell in the workbook.
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