Microsoft Office

Part VI
Programming Excel with VBA
user what type of change to make to the cells. The solution is to present a dialog box like the one shown in
Figure 41.1. This dialog box is a UserForm that was created by using the Visual Basic Editor, and it is displayed
by a VBA macro.
FIGURE 41.1
A UserForm that asks the user for an option.
Another solution is to develop three macros, one for each type of text case change. Combining these three
operations into a single macro and using a UserForm is a more efficient approach, however. I discuss this
example, including how to create the UserForm, in “Another UserForm Example,” later in the chapter.
UserForm Alternatives
Once you get the hang of it, developing UserForms isn’t difficult. But sometimes using the tools that are
built into VBA is easier. For example, VBA includes two functions (InputBox and MsgBox) that enable
you to display simple dialog boxes without having to create a UserForm in the VB Editor. You can customize
these dialog boxes in some ways, but they certainly don’t offer the number of options that are available
in a UserForm.
The InputBox function
The InputBox function is useful for obtaining a single input from the user. A simplified version of the
function’s syntax follows:
InputBox(prompt[,title][,default])
The elements are defined as follows:
n prompt: Text that is displayed in the input box. (Required)
n title: Text that appears in the input box’s title bar. (Optional)
n default: The default value. (Optional)
The following is an example of how you can use the InputBox function:
CName = InputBox(“Customer name?”,”Customer Data”)
When this VBA statement is executed, Excel displays the dialog box shown in Figure 41.2. Notice that this
example uses only the first two arguments for the InputBox function and does not supply a default value.
When the user enters a value and clicks OK, the value is assigned to the variable CName. Your VBA code
can then use that variable.
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