Managing Macros

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Managing Macros' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Attaching Macros to Documents
When you distribute documents to other people, you may want those documents to have associated macros that the reader can access. This can be a problem, as discussed in this tip.

Changing a Macro Description
Part of documenting macros is to provide a good, succinct description of what they do. Changing the description of an existing macro is easy if you apply the techniques described in this tip.

Clean Up Your Macro List
Record several different macros, and before you know it the macro list in Word is cluttered with a lot of old, unused macros. This tip explains how to easily clean up your macro list to get rid of these no-longer-needed macros.

Deleting a Macro
No longer need a macro you created last week or last month? Here's how to get rid of it.

Disabled Macros
Did you recently upgrade from Word 97 to a later version of Word, only to find that your macros no longer work? Here's the reason, along with how to fix the situation.

Hiding Macros
Macros are normally visible in the Macros dialog box, except under very specific circumstances. If you don't want a macro to be visible, then it is important that you understand those circumstances and how to use them in your own macros.

Macro Error when Closing Document
Word can run macros both when opening and closing a document, if such macros exist. If there is an error in the macro, you'll see an error message. How you get rid of the error message is described in this tip.

Making Macros Readily Available
Create a Macros menu to make your most common macros immediately available.

Recovering Macros and AutoText Entries from Normal.dot
Many of your custom configurations of Word—most notably macros and AutoText entries—are stored in the Normal.dot template. When you try to move these entries from one system to another, you could run into problems. This tip explains what to do if trying to transfer macros and AutoText entries causes your system to hang.

Removing a Macro from a Shortcut Key
You can quickly assign shortcut keys to macros, but may later want to remove those associations. Here's how to quickly remove the shortcut keys you no longer want.

Renaming a Macro
When macros are first created, they are given unique names by which you can reference them. If you want to change the name assigned to a macro, then there are a couple of things you can do, each described in this tip.

Restoring a Keyboard Shortcut
Word uses keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of tasks. Sometimes you may create a shortcut that messes up one of the other shortcuts you really need to keep. This tip explains how you can "undo" a shortcut key assignment so that everything gets back to normal.

Using the Organizer to Manage Macros
There may come a time when you want to copy or rename macros. You can do this quite easily by using the Organizer tool provided by Word.