Formatting feature vs convention?

[schnappy]

Here's a tricky one for those of you who haven't bludged the bullshit theory component of ITA all year - what's the difference between a 'formatting feature' and a 'convention'?

Thanks

[ben92]

A convention is an accepted way of presenting information (e.g. writing someone's name on its own line on an envelope) while a format is simply how you alter an element's appearance (e.g. making a heading bold.)

[schnappy]

Well that's an incredibly fine line... thanks.

Here's another one: In terms of the ITA course what is a macro and when/what are they used/for? I've really gotten learn a heap of this little stuff now... teacher never mentioned macros, and the way we did vlookup in practical work was different to the 'normal' way.

[nacho]

A macro is something which is able to execute a series of tasks.
It would be used when you are performing a task quite often, which may be complex to do and prone to error
E.g. "Format the spreadsheet, by bolding all headings, putting '$' in columns...and print"
If i were to do this every day manually, it'd waste a lot of time, and it's possible I'd make mistakes.
If i create a macro, i record all the procedures and when i execute the macro, the process is carried out, thus saving
time, effort (efficient) and because the macro does the exact same thing every time, there are no errors - accurate output (effective)
I put a little thing on VLOOKUP, located here: http://vcenotes.com/forum/index.php/topic,32827.0.html
Also, i don't think we are required to create macros, just know the definition.

[schnappy]

Wow, thanks! So it's quite intuitive, I though we had to know about the constraints of a macro etc. A macro does shit for you. Simple.