Excel macro recorder exercises On advanced Excel courses I teach attendees how to use the macro recorder. I also start VBA beginner trainings with the recorder and analysing the recorded code. I find the macro recorder a good entry point to learning VBA and programming. I'm always struggling with exercises though.

What exercises do you use when teaching MS Office macro recorder? Exercises that make sense in the real word. (E.g. creating a macro that writes "Hello World" in the active cell is fun and educational, but completely pointless in the real world.)

The main goal here is to give them a feel for the rigid sort of thinking macros and programming requires, and also to whet their appetite for macro programming, to show them how mundane tasks can be automated.
I'll start by adding the exercises I'm currently using, but please don't let this stop you from posting more!


Create a macro that inserts a header row. (Story: "Every day I download a csv file. Always the same structure, but it is missing the header row. I want a macro that inserts a formatted header above my data.")
Number formatting macro (Story: "I regularly use a certain currency format, and I hate having to dig through menus to get it. I want a shortcut for it.")
Date stamp macro ("I want a macro that puts the current date into the selected cell. I always want the current date, but I want it to stay the same and not change every day.")
Fill empty cells from above ("I need a macro that fills all the empty cells in the selected region with the value above the empty cells. A good use case is a pivot table that has been pasted as values, and is missing the values in the first column.")


On the more complex side, I have an exercise where I ask them to create a macro to copy entire rows from one sheet to the first empty row in another one.

I have a few more, but they are totally artificial practice exercises.