Don’t worry, I’m not offended Yes, this could be done in Perl, but why bother when I’m using emacs anyway and the lisp engine is right there? And I find that the REPL and incremental development makes it much nicer.

kmacro-edit-macro

might be what you are looking for. It doesn’t exactly make a function, but it does allow you to edit the macro fairly simply.

Reading and modifying a function is easy while a macro, which is a sequence of keys, is hard to read and I don’t know how to modify a macro.

There must be a way to combine the good of macros and the good of functions. Does anybody know how to automatically convert a macro to a readable function?

I like your question and I think it deserves a more extensive answer than I’m going to give here.

The reason I wrote a function for this is fairly obvious – I need to extract similar data based on a provided file every day (and I have not got around to automating it) therefore a throw-away macro would be unsatisfactory.

I’m not sure how the fact that it is possible on OpenOffice is relevant. Although it is great to hear it is scriptable.