Problem 1
In MS Word, the Align commands as pictured below, do not work on textboxes. I have a textbox and a shape and would like them centered together.
Solution
I'd like to write a VBA sub that'd take care of this. It is however quite complicated to determine which two objects are selected, especially if they're on a canvas or only one of them is on a canvas. It seems easier to read their names off the Selection taskpane.
Problem 2
How to determine which objects are highlighted on the Selection pane? In the example below, I'd like VBA to know that "3-Point Star 10" and "3-Point Star 9" are selected.
Related
In Outlook 2010 I have a UserForm with a ListBox.
This ListBox has 4 columns where I show a list of attachments (the columns "File-Name", "File-Type", "File-Size" and "Target-Directory".
Unfortunately the ListBox is restricted in layout functionality, the user can not adjust the column width at runtime (so I have to specify the width of the columns by design).
Because the file path can be quiet long, I set the width of the last column to 999 Pt.
So my ListBox has a horizontal scrollbar.
I want to have the following layout changes to my ListBox:
Add column headers
Change the alignment of a column to right-aligned
Optional: allow the user to sort the list by any column
Optional: allow the user to sort change the width of any column
Optional: show a grid in the ListBox
For 1. I found some answers that this is very complicated and I should use static labels above the list instead.
This is not possible, because my ListBox can be scrolled horizontally.
Is the ListBox really so restricted or is #1 and #2 possible somehow?
I know that there are foreign components available, but I am not allowed to buy any component.
And my solution should work at my colleagues too, so they would also have to install these components.
I have been experimenting with possible solutions to your problem. I think I have taken the listbox approach as far as it will go so I will share what I have discovered.
I can find nothing on the web to suggest that anyone believes you can have listbox column headers without using property RowSource. To use RowSource, you set it to an Excel range.
I got Outlook to create an Excel workbook and to write some data to it. Unfortunately, I could not find any way of getting an Outlook user form to access an Excel range. The syntax for setting RowSource is:
ListBox1.RowSource = "Emails!A2:D20"
This is not the standard syntax for a range and I have failed to discover any method of extending it to include a workbook name.
Jonah_Hess describes an interesting approach in https://stackoverflow.com/a/43381634/973283. He has two list boxes. One is a one-line listbox that contains the headings and the other contains the data. The two listboxes are set to the same number of columns with the same widths. This gives an attractive appearance but if you scroll the data listbox, the headings listbox does not scroll with it. This is not really any different from placing labels above a single listbox.
I tried putting the headings and the data list boxes in a frame and scrolling the frame but could not get it to work. I have used frames with VB user forms but the functionality is very different so there are no lessons learnt that I could bring to a VBA user form. Perhaps someone more familiar with VBA frames could get this approach to work.
I gave up trying to get a solution in Outlook. An Excel macro can access Outlook data so I tried that approach.
I created a macro-enabled workbook. Within it, I have two forms both of which fill the screen to conceal the worksheet. The first form just says: “Please wait while I load data from Outlook”. I am not clear about the data on your form so I imported selected details from a folder full of junk emails which I wrote to a worksheet. I sized the columns for the list box to match those for the worksheet. The result was:
The text is a little small but I think it is readable. The listbox at the bottom allows me to select emails for different periods. Long ago I had problems with RowSource which meant I could change the values in the range but I could not change the size of the range. I have either managed to avoid that problem today or it was a bug that has been fixed.
You can see that the headings are displayed. The columns are a little wide but I consider them to be a reasonable first approximation. Options to change the widths would be easy to implement.
The changes you ask for:
Add column headers. Done
Change the alignment of a column to right-aligned. Possible but difficult. You would need to pad the text with an appropriate number of leading spaces.
Optional: allow the user to sort the list by any column. The data is in a worksheet so easy.
Optional: allow the user to change the width of any column. I have set the column widths at runtime to show it is possible.
Optional: show a grid in the ListBox. Not possible.
If the above is interesting, I could show you all my code and instruct you on creating the forms so you could duplicate my experiment. Alternately, I could just explain: how I imported the Outlook data to Excel, how I included the column headings and how I set the column widths.
I cannot find anything to suggest that anything better can be achieved with listboxes.
An alternative approach is to use a grid of labels. This can give an attractive appearance and one or more columns could be right-aligned. Using the Controls property of the user form, you can treat the grid as a two-dimensional array. I have used this technique long ago and found it attractive and not particularly difficult.
In order to set the alignment of a specific column to the right, trying the opposite way might help you:
Set TextAlign attribute of the listbox to "3-fmTextAlignRight".
Add spaces at the END of the each data in the column of sourcearray, which you want to align LEFT. The number of added spaces should be so large as to exceed the width of the column in which the data appears. You don't have to mind whether the number fits to the columnwidth (overflown spaces do no harm). You may prefer to use & String(30, " ") instead (30 is just for example) .
If added spaces seem to be wholly ignored (i.e. data appear right-aligned only), further add any single character (such as "_") at the end of the spaces.
This is a cosmetic solution, but works when seeing left-aligned figures is too annoying.
After doing the above, please be careful when selecting from the list (trimming the added spaces, keeping BoundColumn data intact, etc.).
This trick works for both Excel and Outlook (not sure for other applications).
Test result in Outlook VBA (...trailing 50 spaces are added to data in column 1 and 4.)
Hope this helps.
Is there a reason why my MS Word VBA macro is ignoring a dropdown list I placed inside a shape (a rich text box)? I've tried referring to it by tag, name, number, etc. I even had the macro tell me the count of content controls:
MsgBox(ActiveDocument.ContentControls.Count)
I get 0.
Nothing works. If I take it out of the shape, it works fine. MS Word gives me a count of 1 item. But for some reason MS Word won't acknowledge it inside the shape. Any help on how to do this?
Edited as my previous post was completely wrong.
Each textbox in the main text story is a Shape which you can access using an index number. A shape has various properties but text etc. is in its Textframe, if it has one. But in that case the Range you need is not called Range but TextRange. So, e.g. the first contentControl in Shape 2 is
ActiveDocument.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange.ContentControls(1)
You will probably need to iterate through your shapes and you may need to verify that a given shape is a textbox and/or that it has a TextFrame.
If your text box is in another Story such as a header or footer, you will probably need to identify the relevant StoryRange.
I'm writing a code generation tool using VBA in Excel (don't ask why—long story). I need to be able to "parse" a flowchart.
The problem is that Excel allows shapes to contain text, with the exception of connectors: lines and arrows can't contain text. To label an arrow, you just put a text box on top of it—but the box isn't "attached" to the arrow in a way that VBA can easily capture.
For example, a user might draw something like this:
Within my VBA code, I can use ActiveSheet.Shapes to find that the flowchart contains seven shapes: there are five boxes (the two labels are just boxes with no border) and two arrows. Then Shape.TextFrame2 will tell me what's written inside each box, and Shape.ConnectorFormat will tell me which box goes at the start and end of each arrow.
What I need is code that can deduce:
Label A belongs to the arrow from Box 1 to Box 2
Label B belongs to the arrow from Box 1 to Box 3
I can think of three ways of doing this, none of them satisfactory.
Ask the user to group each label with its corresponding arrow.
Find out the coordinates of the endpoints of each arrow, then
calculate which arrows pass through which labels.
Find out the coordinates of the corners of each box, then calculate
which labels lie between which pairs of boxes.
Method 1 makes things easier for the programmer but harder for the user. It opens up a lot of potential for user error. I don't see this as an acceptable solution.
Method 2 would be reasonably easy to implement, except that I don't know how to find out the coordinates!
Method 3 is doable (Shape.Left etc will give the coordinates) but computationally quite messy. It also has potential for ambiguity (depending on placement, the same label may be associated with more than one arrow).
Note that methods 2 and 3 both involve trying to match every label with every arrow: the complexity is quadratic. Typical applications will have 10–50 arrows, so this approach is feasible, if somewhat inelegant.
Does anyone have a better idea? Ideally it would be something that doesn't involve coordinate geometry and complicated logic, and doesn't involve asking users to change the way they draw flowcharts.
Edited to add: example 2 in response to Tim Williams
Here's a label whose bounding box intersects the bounding box of both arrows, and whose midpoint isn't inside the bounding box of either arrow. Visually it's easy for a human to see that it belongs with the left arrow, but programmatically it's hard to deal with. If I can find out the coordinates of the arrows' endpoints, then I can calculate that one arrow passes through the label's box but the other doesn't. But if all I have is the bounding rectangles of the arrows, then it doesn't work.
Interesting problem. What if you considered the range covered by the arrow and the range covered by the textbox and matched them up based on the most overlap.
Sub ListShapes()
Dim shp As Shape
Dim shpArrow As Shape
Dim vaArrows As Variant
Dim i As Long
Dim rIntersect As Range
Dim aBestFit() As String
Dim lMax As Long
vaArrows = Split("Straight Arrow Connector 7,Straight Arrow Connector 9", ",")
ReDim aBestFit(LBound(vaArrows) To UBound(vaArrows))
For i = LBound(vaArrows) To UBound(vaArrows)
Set shpArrow = Sheet1.Shapes(vaArrows(i))
lMax = 0
For Each shp In Sheet1.Shapes
If shp.Name Like "Label*" Then
Set rIntersect = Intersect(Sheet1.Range(shp.TopLeftCell, shp.BottomRightCell), _
Sheet1.Range(shpArrow.TopLeftCell, shpArrow.BottomRightCell))
If Not rIntersect Is Nothing Then
If rIntersect.Count > lMax Then
lMax = rIntersect.Count
aBestFit(i) = shp.Name
End If
End If
End If
Next shp
Next i
For i = LBound(vaArrows) To UBound(vaArrows)
Debug.Print vaArrows(i), aBestFit(i)
Next i
End Sub
I tested this with the five box-two arrow setup and nothing more complicated. I put my two arrows in an array, but I assume you have ways to identify the arrows. I also named my untethered boxes "Label x" so I could identify them, but again I assume you have something more sophisticated.
The code loops through every arrow. Inside that loop, it loops through every shape. If it's a label, then it counts the cells in the intersection of the two ranges. Whichever has the most is stored in the best fit array.
It would be nice if you had a reasonable corpus of flow charts to test this to see where the pitfalls are. I don't think this is necessarily better than use the coordinates, just a different approach.
You can find the coordinates of the arrow's endpoints as follows.
First of all, the .Left, .Top, .Width and .Height properties describe the bounding rectangle of the arrow, as Tim Williams points out.
Next, check the .HorizontalFlip and .VerticalFlip properties. If both are false, then the arrow runs from top left to bottom right in its bounding rectangle. That is, the beginning of the arrow has coordinates (.Left,.Top) and the end has coordinates (.Left+.Width,.Top+.Height).
If either *.Flip is true, then the coordinates need to be swapped around as appropriate. E.g., if .HorizontalFlip is true but .VerticalFlip false, then the arrow runs from (.Left+.Width,.Top) to (.Left,.Top+.Height).
As far as I can tell, this is not documented anywhere on MSDN. Thanks to Andy Pope for mentioning it at excelforums.com.
Given this, method 2 seems like the best approach.
Ok, So I'm constantly battling with Microsoft as I'm creating several templates for a few customers. My problem is this, simple textbox placeholders scattered all around a document allows me to press TAB to go to the next placeholder. Much like Tab order in Visual Studio. But for some strange reason, this doesn't work with rich textbox placeholders. And I need to use rich text for a few textboxes because the user should be allowed to alter the formatting of single characters. This is not possible with simple textboxes.
So I was thinking, could this be possible using macros? For example, if a textbox placeholder is selected and the macro is run, go to the next placeholder?
The Shape/TextBox objects can be accessed through
ThisDocument.Shapes.Item(index)
and checking the returned Shape object for
theShape.Type = msoTextBox
However, the Shape objects will be returned in the order that they were created, not their order on the page/document. To find the 'next' TextBox, you are probably going to have to loop through all TextBoxes and investigate their location (.Top, .Left etc) in order to find the correct one to move to with:
theNextShape.Select
I have 4 stacked textboxes in the body of an SSRS report and am getting a stray space / extra line between textboxes 3 & 4.
This is for an address block - name / title / email / website. Can't put it in a single textbox with intervening vbcrlf tokens because the email and website are links. I've tried formatting it to remove vertical spacing; also calculated the exact position by taking top + height to calculate the position. And of course I've tried positioning it so there are exactly 0 pixels between the text boxes. If I reverse the position of #3 & #4 the rendering looks the same so it isn't stray formatting characters in the data fields.
The solution is to wrap the stacked boxes in a rectangle.
I had this problem as well. It blew my mind until I started over on another part of the form. The new boxes worked perfectly until I moved them to the right of another set of text boxes which had some word wrap in them. I realized the wordwrapped boxes were directly related to the gaps I was seeing the set of textboxes to the right. I guess there's some kind of poor markup going on that tries to line things up horizontally and enclosing the set of textboxes in a rectangle protects them from it.
good idea on putting the info into a table - jumping off that idea - I'm going to construct a dynamic string in my query and output the dynamic string into a textbox. thank you for the idea, I don't know why I didn't think to do that.
Simpler thing is to just check text alignment - the default is "default" which appears to be centered. Changing the text box to the right to "left" fixed this problem for me.
Reduce padding property of the textbox.
Once dragging the textbox one closer to the other the tooltip shows convergence points between two textboxes - make tooltip show 0 points
it is best I could do to control the spacing