Programming Excel with VBA and .NET

Dialogs Collection Constants

Use the Dialogscollection to display Excel’s built-in dialog boxes. Each dialog box in Excel has a corresponding Dialogsconstant as listed in Table A-1. To display the dialog box, use the Show method:

Application.Dialogs(xlDialogActiveCellFont).Show

The Show method takes a variable number of optional arguments, which are also listed in Table A-1. Those arguments set the initial property of the dialog box. For example, the following code displays the Font dialog box with Helvetica, Italic, 14 point selected:

Application.Dialogs(xlDialogActiveCellFont).Show "Helvetica", "Italic", "14"

The Show method returns True if the user clicks OK or False if the user cancels the operation. (Some dialog boxes don’t have any options.)

Table A-1 lists some dialog box constants more than once. In those cases, the dialog box takes different arguments depending on what object currently has focus in Excel. For example, xlDialogPageSetup has three versions: the first is for printing worksheets, the second is for printing charts, and the third is for printing Excel 5.0 dialog sheets (which are obsolete).

Table A-1. Dialogs collection constants (continued)

Constant	Show arguments
xlDialogActivate	window_text, pane_num
xlDialogActiveCellFont	font, font_style, size, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, outline, shadow, underline, color, normal, background, start_char, char_count
xlDialogAddChartAutoformat	name_text, desc_text
xlDialogAddinManager	operation_num, ...