Creating VBA Message Boxes

Quick reference

• 00:05 Over the next few modules, we are gonna look at how to collect feedback
• 00:08 from users and how to actually pop up messages to display what's going on.
• 00:13 And the primary character that we use for doing that is the VBA MsgBox.
• 00:18 To create a message box is actually relatively straight forward.
• 00:20 Every message box we're going to use takes about four parts altogether.
• 00:24 The first one is the actual call for the msgbox and you'll hit a space and
• 00:29 put in a quote because we're working on the prompt.
• 00:33 So the first part we get is a message here, so
• 00:35 I'm gonna type in something that says I am a Message box close my quotes.
• 00:40 When I hit comma, it gives me the options for the message box style
• 00:45 we're gonna use and I'm going to work with one called VB okay only and
• 00:49 we'll look at a lot of these in the next couple of minutes here.
• 00:53 I'm going to then hit comma and it asks me to provide a custom title for
• 00:58 the message box.
• 00:59 So if I leave this blank it will just come up with a title of Microsoft Excel, but
• 01:02 I'd rather have something of my own.
• 01:04 Something that says maybe hello.
• 01:07 And at this point when I arrow down you'll notice that re-indents the line,
• 01:10 everything looks good, not syntax errors or complaints.
• 01:13 So at this point, I'm going to see how I run this.
• 01:15 At this point, I'm going to click going to click in the middle here.
• 01:18 And I'm just gonna click run arrow and
• 01:20 you'll notice that it pops up a message box that says, Hello I am a message box.
• 01:24 There we go. So
• 01:25 that easy to create your very first basic message box.
• 01:29 One big key the reason why have Excel doc on the left hand side here because
• 01:33 the message box actually doesn't show in the VBA window,
• 01:36 it shows in the Excel window.
• 01:37 So if I actually have I have my VBA window maximized at this point in time,
• 01:41 it would have actually kicked me back over to Excel because I have Excel
• 01:45 showing a little bit on screen here it will actually pop it up in front.
• 01:48 So, that works out nicely for me.
• 01:51 Now, what if we want to actually have a line break and
• 01:54 the message starts to get really long.
• 01:56 Well, we actually have four different character sets that we can use in order to
• 02:00 create a line break.
• 02:02 And you'll notice in this case here that I have my message box set up it says that I
• 02:05 want this or want this message, and
• 02:07 then we've got this closed quotes and we've got this and vb new line and.
• 02:12 And then we open the quotes again, say, show on two lines.
• 02:15 And if you look down each line, we've got vb new line.
• 02:18 We've got another consonant here called vbcr,
• 02:20 which is a visual basic carriage return.
• 02:22 A vblf, which is the visual basic line feed or the vb.
• 02:26 CRLF which is the Visual Basic character term NYE characters.
• 02:31 So if I go and
• 02:32 run this right now, you'll see what these look like is breaks this out.
• 02:35 And every one of them is completely identical.
• 02:37 Also, notice the okay only style I did not declare the okay only here.
• 02:42 That's the default, so it shows up here.
• 02:44 So we say,
• 02:45 OK and you'll notice that every single one of these looks absolutely identical.
• 02:50 So, why do we have four different characters?
• 02:52 Well, the answer is that if you're working with Windows, most of the time you're
• 02:55 gonna use vbNewLine or vbCrLf although the others work.
• 02:59 If you're trying to port code to run on a Mac,
• 03:01 you may need to actually run with vbCr or vbLf.
• 03:04 You have to test it to see.
• 03:07 Now, let's just watch the buttons.
• 03:09 You'll notice here that we've got something set up that's giving me
• 03:13 the message I'm using, vbOKOnly, and this is the constant in the middle, vbOKOnly.
• 03:16 And I've got a whole bunch of them OKCancel, RetryCancel.
• 03:19 So, let's take a look at what all these look like.
• 03:22 This is vbOKOnly.
• 03:24 It's got an OK button and that's it.
• 03:26 This is OK, Cancel.
• 03:29 And it actually doesn't matter which button I click at this point in time.
• 03:31 It's just gonna take me to the next screen,
• 03:33 because I'm not trying to capture any input from them.
• 03:35 So I could hit OK or Cancel, it's gonna move forward.
• 03:37 But that's the vbOKCancel style.
• 03:40 This is the vbRetryCancel style, so we've got a Retry and a Cancel button.
• 03:44 We've got the vbYesNo.
• 03:46 VbYesNoCancel.
• 03:51 AbortRetryIgnore and those are the styles you generally gonna end up using to
• 03:56 control which buttons show up on your form.
• 04:01 Now, the next one we have is we also have some options here.
• 04:05 So this one, if we actually take a look at it, instead of using the OKonly,
• 04:09 Cancel and Retry stuff like that.
• 04:11 I've got four different styles that we can actually uses well to
• 04:14 show different icons.
• 04:15 So this is a pb question.
• 04:17 We've got a question mark here.
• 04:19 We've got information which shows little i in the circle, we've got the VB
• 04:23 exclamation which gives us the exclamation part and a point in the yellow triangle
• 04:28 and VB critical, and this is generally the one that we use for stop again notice I've
• 04:32 declared any title so we've got Microsoft Excel as the default here.
• 04:37 Now, this is cool, but
• 04:38 wouldn't it be nice if we could add the icon with the different buttons?
• 04:42 And we can absolutely do that as well.
• 04:44 The way that we do that is that actually we go through and
• 04:47 we add the two constants together.
• 04:49 So, we've got vbCritical + vbOKOnly.
• 04:53 The other thing I should call out here to is that we actually have a secondary
• 04:56 character here that's breaking down this command under multiple lines.
• 05:00 So, the space underscore is a line break in your code.
• 05:03 So, that you can actually line things up.
• 05:05 This is exactly the equivalent of doing this.
• 05:08 So, if I've got space underscore Enter and then I can tab it over.
• 05:13 This'll all be treated as one line when I run it.
• 05:16 So let's go take a look at what this looks like now.
• 05:20 This is the vbCritical in vbOkOnly.
• 05:22 So we've got the Ok button only and we've got the critical Icon.
• 05:28 This one here is slightly different we got the Yes No and we got the question icon.
• 05:32 So we have a little bit control of how we actually design our message boxes actually
• 05:37 look so that's the fundamental layer of how message box is can be configure to
• 05:41 look, and then our next module will go around and
• 05:43 figure out how we can actually read the input back.

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