How do I use Excel 2010 Personal Macro Workbook?

Question

I want all of the macros that I've written to always be available when I'm using Microsoft Excel 2010. How can I do this?

Answer 1

In excel 2010, the personal macro workbook is located at C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART\PERSONAL.xlsb. The best way to create this is to record a macro into your personal macro workbook. You do this by:

1. Enabling the developer tab by going to File - Options - Customize Ribbon and checking developer on the right side of the screen
   
2. Go to the developer tab and click on record macro
   
3. Store Macro In your Personal Macro Workbook
   
4. Stop Recording macro
   
5. When you close out of excel or the workbook, it will prompt you Do you want to save the changes you made to PERSONAL.xlsb select save
   

   You will now have a personal macro workbook that is visible anytime you open excel. If you have macros stored in other workbooks you can transfer them to the personal macro workbook by moving the modules within Visual Basic in excel. Additionally, if you have a workbook with a lot of macros, you can navigate to the file location and rename that workbook to PERSONAL and save it as .xlsb

Answer 2

I know you've answered your own question here, and it is helpful, but for people wanting to transfer an old personal macro workbook from an Excel 2007 and below, to Excel 2010, they should copy

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART\PERSONAL.XLS

to the same location on the new machine, without renaming it XLSB. Depending on the version of windows, %APPDATA% will point to different locations, so they should use the windows variable when typing their pathname on both machines.

As you said, the directory XLSTART won't exist until a personal macro workbook is created, but manually creating it won't hurt, so long as they restart Excel.