Tools To Know About: Macros

This is the first in a series of posts that will highlight tools The Five Colleges are using with digital collections. The tool to start this series off is the little-know but very powerful Macro.

Macros allow users to record a series of steps in a program, then automatically play back those step at any time. Frequently macros are used in Microsoft Office and Excel to reformat text or data, run repetitive find and replace searches, merge information, apply functions, or transform data into another format.

We're using a few macros now with digital collections. OhioLINK has a fantastic macro that takes an Excel spreadsheet and transforms the data into XML ready to be loaded into the DRC -so much easier than typing XML tags by hand! We also have a macro at Kenyon that builds on the one from OhioLINK but lets users start with a student worker safe document (lots of locked down fields and lengthy explanations). And I'm just finishing one for Oberlin that can take an listing in Refworks and pull out the metadata for inclusion in the DRC.

My favorite use of macros is to prevent retyping of data. I started working on the Oberlin macro after watching a staff member copy information she looked up in the EJC (Electronic Journal Center) into the Oberlin DRC input form one field at a time. Now she can just export the EJC entry and run the macro. She still has to check the information and a bad export results in bad data, but it can save a lot of time.

If you work with digital collections and find that you spend time retyping information or are constantly doing the same few steps in Word or Excel let me know, and we can see about building a macro for you.