Excel® 2007 Power Programming with VBA

Chapter 12. Custom Dialog Box Alternatives

In This Chapter

Dialog boxes are, perhaps, the most important user interface element in Windows programs. Virtually every Windows program uses them, and most users have a good understanding of how they work. Excel developers implement custom dialog boxes by creating UserForms. However, VBA provides the means to display some built-in dialog boxes. This chapter covers the following topics:

• Using an input box to get user input

• Using a message box to display messages or get a simple response

• Selecting a file from a dialog box

• Selecting a directory

• Displaying Excel’s built-in dialog boxes

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of creating UserForms, you might find it helpful to understand some of Excel’s built-in tools that display dialog boxes. That’s the focus of this chapter.

Before You Create That UserForm . . .

In some cases, you can save yourself the trouble of creating a custom dialog box by using one of several prebuilt dialog boxes. The sections that follow describe various dialog boxes that you can display without creating a UserForm.

Using an Input Box

An input box is a simple dialog box that allows the user to make a single entry. For example, you can use an input box to let the user enter text, a number, or even select a range. There are actually two ways to generate an InputBox: one by using a VBA function, and the other by using a method of the Application object.

The VBA InputBox function

The syntax for VBA’s InputBox function is:

InputBox(prompt[,title][,default][,xpos][,ypos][,helpfile, ...