Microsoft Excel is a popular construction cost estimating tool; those who use the software so often that they find themselves typing the same formulas over and over could benefit from a Microsoft Excel macro tutorial.
A macro is a sequence of keystrokes, such as a formula or string of text, that a user can store and recall with a single keyboard command. The Microsoft Office Online documents About macros in Excel and Record and use Excel macros provide some basic information about what macros can do, but some users, especially contractors with little computer experience, may find themselves in need of more Microsoft Excel macro help.
That's where Gail Perry's Excel 2007 Macros Made Easy comes in. This book shows readers how to create a macro in Microsoft Excel and then run and revise that macro. Perry also provides some hints for working with Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA, which is the programming language that Microsoft Office uses to record macros.
Readers of ConstructionSoftwareReview.com can download an excerpt from Excel 2007 Macros Made Easy. To download the PDF, click on the link below -- left-click to open the document now and right-click to save the file and read it later.
Chapter 10, Creating If/Then/Else Routines, demonstrates how routines can be used to write logical macros with true and false statements. As Perry puts it, "The Else statement in the If/Then/Else routine is not a required command in this If/Then structure. You can create If/Then routines that do not include an alternate direction provided by the Else statement."
This chapter of Perry's Microsoft Excel macro tutorial then goes on to demonstrate how to write macros for typical If/Then and If/Then/Else routine. The chapter ends with a look at multilevel routines, which have several layers of If conditions, and nested routines, which ask more than one If question and have different layers of Then statements based on the answers.
*** Excerpted from Excel 2007 Macros Made Easy (ISBN: 9780071599580) by Gail Perry. Copyright 2008. Published by McGraw-Hill Professional. Reprinted with permission.