How To Enable The Developer Option In Excel

In this quick tutorial I’ll show you how to Enable the Developer Option In Microsoft Excel.

Do you need the Developer Option Enabled?

Firstly it’s worth asking if you need the developer enabled for what you want to do?

You don’t need to have the “Developer” option enabled if you just want to get into the VBA Editor.

If that’s all you want to do, pressing the “Alt” key and “F11” will achieve this for you.

However you do need the developer option if you wish to place controls such as Buttons (which can be used to launch your macros), Listboxes or Comboboxes on your spreadsheet.

To Enable the Developer Option in Excel

Click on “Customize Ribbon” then tick the “Developer” check box and you’re good to go.

Developer Tab Features

The developer option enables you to Access Excel macro functionality.

Without the developer option enabled your Excel menu looks like this…

Once the Developer option has been enabled it will then look like the image below …

It’s got four main sections "Code", "Add-Ins", "Controls" and "XML"

"Controls" and "Code" are the most frequently used sections (I’ve never used "XML" and hardly ever "Add-Ins").

Clicking the Visual Basic button (above) takes you to the Visual Basic editor, where VBA code (macros) are developed and stored (Alt + F11 will get you the same result).

The “Macros” button (second from the left) launches the “Macros” dialog box (Here you can see a macro called "TestMacro")

The record macro button changes to “Stop Recording” while macro is recording, click “Stop Recording” when your done.

The recorded code will be saved to your VBA editor with a custom name, I chose “MyRecordedMacro” which is automatically saved to Module2, which was the next available module (the macro recorder created Module2).

If I chose to record another macro it would be recorded to Module3, it’s best to tidy up the macros after recording, for example copy them into the same module and delete the unused modules for tidyness sake.