Recording Print Settings and Modifying Your QAT We all have our favorite print settings, and I can’t count the number of times I have gone through the print settings dialog box to change the settings. This process always includes exactly the same steps, and it takes a number of mouse clicks. In short, it is a bother. This is a perfect situation for a recorded macro that does it once and saves it in the Personal Macro Workbook for easy future use. Here are the steps.

1. Turn the recorder on, give the macro a name such as Print Settings, and indicate that you want to store it in the Personal Macro Workbook.

2. Open the print settings dialog box, change the settings to the way you want them, and turn the recorder off.

3. Check the code. You will see that every possible print setting has been recorded, not just those you changed. You can leave this as is, or you can streamline the code to change only settings of interest.

 4. In Excel 2003 and earlier, you could now create a new toolbar with a new toolbar button to run your Print Settings macro. (This process was explained in the second edition of the book.) This is no longer possible in Excel 2007 or later versions,3 but there is an alternative. At the top of the Excel screen, you see the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). This is where you can create a button to run your favorite macros. The following steps explain the process.

5. Click the dropdown next to the QAT and select More Commands.

6. In the top left dropdown, select Macros. You should see your Print Settings macro in the list. Select it, and click the Add>> button to add it to your QAT. By default, it will have a generic button icon. To change the icon, click the Modify button and choose from the available icons. Then back your way out. (By the way, it would be nice to change the available icons or add to them. This isn’t necessarily easy, but it can be done. See Section 16.4 for details.)

This process of recording a macro, saving it to your Personal Macro Workbook, and creating a button on the QAT to run the macro makes you an instant programmer. You will be amazed at how useful simple little macros can be if you design them to automate tasks you perform frequently.