Before I found Richard's videos which actually (finally) had the ability to not only convey the information I needed, entertain and keep my attention, all without me falling asleep, I spent a year or two doing everything with Macros.

More than just basic automation. I had built a payroll processing application that did all of the tax and deduction calculations looking up values from multiple tables, etc.

Macros can do most of what VBA can, however, the rigid layout of the Macro editor became very frustrating. Plus there is, or at least used to be a bug in the editor that if you would forget to move to a blank field, or at least ensured you didn't have any text highlighted, when you went to save or close/save the macro it would crash the editor and Access, before you could get your work saved.

Now, generally the only time I use them is for startup handling, the QAT as Richard said, or for basic Triggers - and for those I typically just have them call code.

But, even with the rigid structure, Macros are a fantastic stepping stone because once you know how to do it with a Macro, the VBA code is usually very similar but often easier to create.