What is a macro?

Generically, a macro is a series of application-specific program steps that simplify a series of tasks by referencing just the macro name. Often associated with Microsoft Office applications, macros can be provided by Microsoft as menu items, or with the integrated Visual Basic programming language, one can create their own Microsoft macros using that predefined language and Microsoft keywords. One can then reference these custom macros from the Microsoft application.

Apple's applications do not use macros. Some applications are built to support Apple's AppleScript programming language that can allow you to write the code that can manipulate features of those applications to simplify tedious tasks. For instance, I have written an AppleScript solution that allows one to drag and drop a Pages document(s) onto a Desktop application and it automatically invokes Pages to open that document and export it to PDF. This would be otherwise tedious to do manually.