When you click OK in the Record Macro dialog box, Excel creates a container, called a module, for the new VBA code, storing the module in the active workbook. As you carry out the actions for the recorder to record, Excel transcribes those actions into the new module.

The module doesn’t appear with the other worksheets and chart sheets in the workbook. To view it, press Alt+F11. This takes you to the Visual Basic Editor. In the upper-left corner of the Visual Basic Editor, you’ll find a small window known as the Project Explorer:

Yours will look different depending on how you’ve named the current workbook and what other workbooks happen to be open. But in any case, you should see the entry Modules with an outline control (a plus sign) beside it. Click the outline control, and then double-click the entry Module1 that appears. To the right of the Project Explorer, you will see the Code window for Module1, which is displayed in Figure 27-3.

Figure 27-3. Excel stores the VBA code for each action you record in a module. You can inspect and edit it in the Visual Basic Editor.

As you can see, a module looks like a window you might see in a word processor. The menu bar above the module includes menus for editing, debugging, and running VBA code. In the module, you can review, type, copy, move, insert, and delete VBA statements and comments, just as you might manipulate text in a word processor. From the Visual Basic Editor, you can switch back to your workbook by clicking the Excel icon at the left edge of the toolbar. From there, you can return to the Visual Basic Editor by pressing Alt+F11.

The Visual Basic Editor is a big place, full of interesting details, but for now we’ll focus only on the code we’ve recorded. The first and last lines act as the beginning point and the endpoint for the macro. A Sub statement starts the macro and names it, and an End Sub statement ends it. You’ll notice that special VBA terms, called keywords, appear in dark blue. (You can view and change the colors assigned to various elements of a macro by clicking Tools, Options in the Visual Basic Editor, and then clicking the Editor Format tab.)

Below the Sub statement are two comment lines, displayed in green. (If you type a description for your macro in the Record Macro dialog box, you’ll find an additional comment line.) Comment lines begin with the apostrophe character and are ignored when you run the macro. Their only purpose is to help you (or anyone else looking at your code) understand what you’ve done and why.

The statements following the comments are the meat of the macro—the code that does the (presumably) useful work. Our simple macro includes four lines that select cells and three lines that enter data.