Mary had a little car Her driving was quite brisk But Mary didn't worry 'cause She only had her *
SRS -
Many of the things one might have used macros for in earlier word proceessors are built into recent Word, if you use the Tools - Options, Customize, and Autocorrect/Autoreplace functions.
In the "automatically replace as you type" setting, you can set up a replacement text that will be inserted when you type a short sequence, just as you previously might have put the longer text in by running a macro. Typing something like "insplead" could be instantly replaced by pages of "pleading boiler plate" that's in all your documents, with no need to type it each time.
(Every law office/legal typist will have set "automatically replace 'trail' with 'trial'" for an obvious, if trivial, example.)
If you use the "automatically correct caps lock errors," it might appear that you'd have to "correct all the miscorrections" to type a corporate "name" like BAe, which is supposed to be two initial caps, but if you put "replace Bae with BAe" into autoreplace, when the caps lock thing changes your BAe to Bae the autoreplace puts it back to BAe and you never see the "flicker." You just have to be aware of the order in which the auto functions are applied.
About the only macro I use with any regularity is the "ANSI Val" one that I picked up years ago. In my Word, if I highlight a character (or sequence of them) and click the button on my toolbar, it displays the ANSI/ASCII numerical value for each of the selected characters, one at a time. Very handy for checking whether the "soft break" in something you copied from html is the 011 or 031 char (both are used some) so that you can use replace ^011 with ^p or replace ^031 with ^p to put real paragraph breaks in - if you want to, avoiding the need to remember all ^b, ^l,^m, ^n etc standard Word "search chars."
I've put off converting it to return Unicode char values, so it ony sometimes reports correct values for really strange chars on some furring websites, but I suppose it could be done. I also haven't tried putting it on my Vista machine as a toolbar button ... yet.