Programming Excel with VBA and .NET

Types of Dialogs

There are many different ways to display dialog boxes using Visual Basic in Excel, so it is helpful to organize those techniques by starting with the type of dialog box you want to display. The three main sorts of dialog boxes are informational displays, data-entry forms, and other tasks. Table 20-1 organizes the ways to display dialogs based on those types.

Table 20-1. Types of dialogs and how to display them

Type of dialog	Example	Use one of these	See
Informational display	Success message	MsgBox function	Chapter 3
	Help	Help or FollowHyperLink method	Chapter 6
Data-entry	Enter values in a list	ShowDataForm method	This chapter
	Advanced data entry	User form	This chapter
Task-specific	Get a value or range	InputBox method	Chapters 3, 7
	Get a file or folder name	FileDialog, GetOpenFilename, or GetSaveAsFilename method	Chapter 7
	Show a built-in Excel dialog box	Dialogs method	Chapter 7
	Set task options or custom properties	User form	This chapter
	Wizard	User form	This chapter

As you can see from Table 20-1, Excel handles the well-structured tasks for you, but as your needs become open-ended, you need to start creating your own user forms. The lesson from Table 20-1 is to not start with the Forms Designer—look around first to see if Excel already does the work for you!