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.
Related
I have a data set containing the following fields:
rack, rack_type, box_number, box_label, row, column
Each rack in the real world is basically a 2D grid with cells, each cell containing an object(a small box in this case). Each box will be associated with a specific position in the rack based on row and column. The size of the grid (number of rows/columns) is different based on rack_type
Is there a way to create a visual representation of these racks from the data supplied above? Specifically, I am looking to create a grid (as if you were looking at it in real life) where each cell shows some text--box_number and box_label in this case. I've been searching for hours on Google to no avail and I don't know if I'm even asking the question correctly. From what I can tell, the normal report/form features in Access do not support such a configuration of data. I'm wondering if there is some VBA solution, since I have some experience with VBA in Excel. Please let me know if this is incomprehensible gibberish.
If your racks has a finite maximum number of boxes in any configuration then you might consider this solution:
Let's say that any of your racks contains at most R boxes
create a form F
open F and add to it R text boxes B (they are not linked to anything)
save the form
now in VBA, on loading a rack you can iterate on each box and use some code to position each each of them on the form, show or hide it, and finally set its size!
Basically you've added to your form more boxes than a typical rack configuration would normally need, and by doing so you can hide some of them when not needed. You have this limit because you cannot create and add at runtime new text boxes to a form in VBA (it should work for reports too).
Note that you could use also other types of objects, text boxes are useful if you want to edit the text inside of them, otherwise you could use a label or anything that suits your needs the most (combo box... for example).
Basic methods that you might want to look at:
cell1.Height = 100
cell1.Visible = Not cell1.Visible
cell1.Move Left:=0, Top:=0, Width:=400, Height:=3000
Anyhow if you get more in details, by giving some examples of your racks we might be able to come with a more detailed solution.
I'm hoping to add custom data labels to a stacked bar chart in Excel 2010. Each bar will have a label value pulled from a value in the sheet which is not necessarily equal to the height of the bar itself.
The sheet I'm making is a template and has drop-down selections to change the units of the data. For example: $MM with 1 decimal point, K with 2 decimal points, $ with 0 decimal points, etc... I'm running into an issue formatting the labels to match the data formatting selections. I've tried two approaches:
Formatting the data labels themselves using VBA. Partial code below for $K with one decimal:
`With ActiveChart.SeriesCollection(x).Points(y)`
.DataLabel.Text.NumberFormat = "$#,##0.0,"
Unfortunately, the labels don't seem to read the commas and divide by one thousand, so I can't accurate display thousands or millions. A value of 1000 in the above code will display as $1,000.0 instead of the desired $1.0.
Format the values in the worksheet, and then just read them with VBA. Basically, I use conditional formatting to properly display the values on the sheet, and then read them with .DataLabel.Text = Cells(r,c)
Unfortunately, though the data is formatted correctly, the values are unchanged and the labels display with no custom formatting at all.
Is there any reasonable way to achieve my goal? I'm hoping there's a way to either (1) make commas count when changing data label number formats or (2) change the actual values of the data in my sheet based on the formatting drop-down selections (instead of just giving them custom formatting which leaves the value unchanged).
Thank you,
Lance
I think the words "conditional formatting" are your issue here: I've had problems with VBA reading the underlying format of a cell when it's conditionally formatted (admittedly, my issue was with colour, rather than number format, but I expect the reasons for it not working would be the same).
If you adopt your second approach, i.e. relying on the worksheet's format using the chart's "Linked to source" option, then on a trigger of when the drop-down option is changed, you could use VBA to set the format on the worksheet instead of using conditional formatting - then the chart would pick up whatever format you're using.
Please try this:
?Format(1000,"$#,##0.0,")
$1.000,0
?Format(1000,"$#,##0,.0")
$1,0
?Format(1234,"$#,##0,.0")
$1,2
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'd like to be able to create a page element which I can feed text and it will form itself into the preferred layout. For instance:
{MACRO DocumentIntro("Introduction to Business Studies", "FP015", "Teachers' Guide")}
with that as a field, the output should be a line, the first two strings a certain size and font, centred, another line and then the third string fonted, sized and centred.
I know that's sort of TeX-like and perhaps beyond the scope of VBA, but if anyone's got any idea how it might be possible, please tell!
EDIT:
Ok, if I put the required information into Keyword, as part of the document properties, with some kind of unique separator, then that gets that info in, and the info will be unique to each document. Next one puts a bookmark where the stuff is going to be displayed. Then one creates an AutoOpen macro that goes to that bookmark, pulls the relevants out of the keywords, and forms the text appropriately into the bookmark's .Selection.
Is that feasible?
You're certainly on the right track here for a coding solution. However, there is a simpler way with no code - this is the type of scenario that Content Controls in Word 2007 were built for and with Fields/Properties, you can bind to content controls (CC). These CC can hold styles (like centered, bold, etc.). No VBA required.
The very easiest thing to do is to pick 3 built-in document properties that you will always want these to be. For example, "Title" could be your first string, "Subject" your second string and "Keywords" your third. Then, just go to the Insert ribbon, Quick Parts, Document Properties and insert, place and format those how you like. Then go to Word's start button (the orb thingy) and then under Prepare choose Properties. Here you can type, for example "Introduction to Business Studies", into the Title box and then just deselect it somehow (like click in another box). The Content Control for Title will be filled in automatically with your text.
If you want to use this for multiple files, just create this file as a .dotx (after CC insertion/placement/formatting and before updating the Document Properties' text). Then every time all you'll have to do is set these three properties with each new file.
Well, yes, it did turn out to be feasible.
Sub autoopen()
Dim sKeywords As String
sKeywords = ActiveDocument.BuiltInDocumentProperties(4)
ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("foo").Select
Selection.Text = sKeywords
End Sub
Okay, I have some filling out to do, but at least the guts of it are there.
I've been using a crude method to help the user update some cells - by having them in a sheet. Is there any way I can display the various ranges in a userform, one by one, then have the user update them, click a button and move onto the next one?
Essentially, can I have Excel automatically generate an input form based on a range? The process of updating and saving back to the sheet I can do; it's the production of the correct form that I can't.
It's possible to do this, but the only way I can think of is to make a userform that automatically populates itself based on a range passed in. This way you could have different macros in Excel that call the form to populate based on different ranges. I built a proof of concept Excel file for trying this, and it seems to work, the only issue I can think of being that you need to figure out a way to tell the user what input field is what.
I think what needs to be done is to add controls programmatically to a userform (I name the textboxes as the cell address it's going to populate) then when the form is closed loop through all the textboxes and populate the cells with the textbox values.
You can see what I did at:
https://my.syncplicity.com/share/uicgbs3rl0/InputForm.xls
I think all that would need to be done is for you to work out how to add labels for the textboxes, and make sure the form is resized based on the controls you add...
I am not quite shure what you are looking for, but you could insert a second sheet and use it as a "form". An other way could be a dialog box with an input field.
Either way, you present the cells you want the user to change one by one, using a vba-function. You implement a "previous field" and a "next field" button, so the user can step through the range of cells. If the user hits "next field", you save his input and take the next cell from a previous defined range of cells.
You could have a "config field" in which you define the range of cells you want to change.
This is pretty rough and old-fashioned but if you have the data in standard list format - i.e. column headers in the first row of your range and then one record of data in each row below - then selecting a cell within the range and going Data > Form will give you a crude input form with roughly the functionality you need.
You can also do this in VBA by calling the ShowDataForm method of the appropriate worksheet. Just select a cell within whichever range you need first. The macro will remain paused until the user closes the data form