Lost Macros

[sumguygreg]

My computer went down the other day. I salvaged the hard drives and and transfered all data to the new computer. I reinstalled Office 2003 on the new computer, no problem so far.



I had about a dozen macros that I previously used. I would like to find them from the files on the old computer, but I don't know how they were saved or where. If someone could point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

[Kaneto]

It really depends on the application. Most Word macros are kept in the Normal.dot file. In Vista and 7 that'll be found in c:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates.

Most Excel macros are saved in individual files. However, you can have a global template file. If you had one, it would be located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office11\XLStart

Hope this helps.

-SW

[sumguygreg]

Thanks for the input...I'm still looking. I found the *.dot files which were all templates, none of my macros. The word macros were simple find/replace routines which I can reconstruct fairly easily, so they are not my main concern. The excel macros, on the other hand, were pretty involved, and it will be very time consuming to recreate them. I was running windows xp at the time of the meltdown, if that helps at all. I didn't give them distinct names, they were macro1, 2 and so forth. If I knew the file extension they were saved as, I could search on that. Thanks again.

[Colin Legg]

If the Excel macros were routines you could use globally (without knowingly having to open a specific workbook) then it is very likely that they were either saved in Personal.xls or in an add-in file (with an .xla extension).

Personal.xls would be stored in Excel's start-up folder, typically found under:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART

An .xla file could be stored anywhere, but a likely bet would be
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns



However, if each macro was specific to a certain workbook then it is likely it was stored within that workbook itself.

[sumguygreg]

Thank you so much, Colin. The macros were stored in personal.xls just as you said they might. I found the file and copied it over to the .../xlstart directory in the new installation, and I'm back in business.