Tab between Excel worksheet cells and form controls - vba

I have a worksheet in Excel 2010 that is protected and used as a form for user-fillable values. The form contains 80 cells to be filled in and two radio button form controls to be selected. The form consists of two pages on the worksheet that are placed side by side horizontally (horizontally is a better user experience than vertically in this situation).
To get tabbing to go through the cells on the first page and then on the second page in the desired order, I used the solution on page 4 of the thread at "http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2007-excel/establishing-enter-order-on-a-protected-sheet/e7a223f3-2dae-4c7b-a37f-1819c68be5dc". This works excellently for regular cells.
The problem is how can I also tab to the radio buttons, which are located about a third of the way through the desired tab sequence? Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just adding the radio button names to the TabOrder array mentioned in the thread.
I've found various threads talking about tabbing between controls, but nothing that solves tabbing from regular cells to form controls, between the form controls, and then back to regular cells.
I'm relatively new to Excel VBA programming and could really use your help. :-)
Thanks!
Don

I can't add a comment, so I have to put this in the answer section even though it is not really an answer: Not sure if this is still an issue for you, but are you using Option Buttons or a Group Box. And are you using Form Controls or ActiveX.
The only thing that I have found that may help is to tab to the group itself, then use the arrow keys: "When you tab to the group, you can use the arrow keys to select the next/previous option." and "2. You can set an accelerator key on each one by adding an ampersand (&) before one letter in the label. For example, if the label's caption is "&Next", it will appear as "Next", and Alt-N will be the keystroke that selects that option. Be careful not to choose a keystroke that opens a menu -- for example, don't pick F, because Alt-F almost alway opens the File menu."
From: http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/microsoft-access/557082-how-idiotic-no-way-tab-stop-option-button-within-group.html

Related

Word document text boxes "remember" what was in them previously

I am using a VBA userform to randomly generate values to be sent into a Word document to provide random questions on various math topics (for my students).
This seems to work well except that when I exit the userform (me.hide) and the values are sent and focus is back in the document, the previous values are still briefly visible every time I move the mouse.
This only happens for an instant. The correctly sent values appear if there is no mouse (or window slider) activity taking place. If I view another application and do some activity there and then return to the Word document the display is fine as well.
The flipping of values is visually annoying. Has anyone out there encountered a similar issue?
To reproduce:
Create a Word document with an ActiveX Textbox and button. The button activates a userform which also contains a Textbox and a button to send the Textbox value back to the Textbox in the document.
In my case, when the button in the document is clicked the form opens and the value does get returned to the Word document, but when rolling the mouse or moving the slider at the edge of the window the previous value in the text box briefly flickers into view. Here is the code from the document button:
Private Sub cmdOk_Click()
ThisDocument.TextBox1.Value = TextBox1.Value
Me.Hide
End Sub
I am using Word 2016 and Windows 10.
I tried to use the "new" Word textboxes but I do not know how to communicate with them from a userform. It is so simple using the "old" text boxes.
ActiveX controls were designed for VBA UserForms. It's possible to insert them on the surface of a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, but they don't always behave optimally. Content controls (and the legacy form fields), on the other hand are designed for the surface of a Word document.
In order to write to a content control you can use code like this:
ActiveDocument.SelectContentControlsByTitle("name").Item(1).Range.Text
Closer to what you're trying to do with identifying the content controls could be:
ActiveDocument.SelectContentControlsByTitle(TextBox1.Name).Item(1).Range.Text = TextBox1.Value
Why it's so complicated: The team that designed content controls wanted to avoid the problems people ran into with bookmarks and form fields, that a name could not be duplicated in a document. It's possible to give the same name to multiple content controls. So it's not possible to identify a content control using Document.ContentControls("name").
Instead, Document.SelectContentControlByTitle needs to be used, which returns an array of content controls. If there's only one (or if you want only one), then you can add on .Item([index]) to get the single content control directly.
Rather than type in a static name, you can query the UserForm's textbox control for its name, if that makes things easier for you.

Word 2010 ActiveX control forms - formatting issues

Hopefully a quick one
I am creating a form in Word with a Save macro that uses an ActiveX Label as a button. The label works fine as a button but I am having 2 issues:
when using the document in normal mode, the coding text in curly brackets for the label is still visible - see image
How do I get rid of this?
When printing the form, the button pushes the header text down a line:
You can see in the first picture that there is no gap here.
Thanks for your help.
(1) Press Alt+F9 to toggle off display of field codes (and make sure you're not in Design Mode).
(2) is impossible to be sure without having the document in front of me but...
Printing problems are notorious with ActiveX controls, which were designed for use with UserForms, not for the document surface. Your best bet for stability would be to use a one-row, two-column table with the button on the left and the address on the right.
Or use a MacroButton field code instead of an ActiveX control.

VB.net Application wide Copy and paste (Text)

Im trying to implement application wide copy and paste short cuts. (ctrl+C) etc.
The application consists of forms drawn in tab pages, and there are quite alot of forms. Ideally im after something (in the keypress of the main form) that would just see if the active control is a text box and If so pastes or copies text. Doing so on every text box on every form is unfeasible.
Another approach i guess would be to override the text box control application wide?
There must be an easy way to do this surely.
My googling so far hasn't come up with anything. Thankyou.
Ok; turns out there was a simple problem preventing this from working.
The EDIT menu in the menu bar on the main parent form was 'consuming' these keyboard short cuts.
Deleting this menu fixed the issue instantly.

how restrict view in MS word 2010?

I have a word file containing many paragraph. I have a heading for each paragraph.Also listed all heading in a single page. What i want is, When user click on heading it can view only that paragraph only. he will not able to view other paragraph. To view other paragraph user need to comeback to the page where all headings are listed.
The way I would try to handle it is to put each paragraph into its own Continuous section and set all of the text as hidden. On the page where you have your headings, put a checkbox next to each one and in the checkbox properties, you can assign it to run a macro (remember to do this after you write your macros).
Now you just write a number of simple macros (one for each paragraph you have) that will change the font property of that paragraph by turning the hidden setting off, while changing the font properties of every other paragraph by turning the hidden settings on.
Now for your checkboxes, you'll need to set them up so that if one is selected, the rest of them are unselected. (You may be able to simply use a radio button instead of a checkbox, but I can't remember off the top of my head if radio buttons allow you to run a macro when selected.)
The thing you need to keep in mind is that some people may have their Word settings set up to always show hidden text, which would ruin the point of keeping stuff hidden. However, I believe you may get around that by adding another macro that turns that setting off as soon as the document is opened.

Option Group frame: can I add text boxes that are part of the frame instead of rad button options?

Ok so this maybe a simple/silly question but I don't know so here goes:
In access let's say I want to have a frame control, so I click the option group button and add it to the desgin surface. However, I am not wanting to use this as a option group with radio button selection, instead I would like to add text boxes instead the frame, so that when I reference the frame, it references every control instead of it, hence the text boxes, cbo boxes, etc.....just as it would if they were radio option selections.
So can you do this?
I want whatever controls I add inside the frame to be easily referenced (i.e. make all controls visible just by using frameExample.visible = true) so that I can build my own tab control groupings.....
can this be done?
Thanks!
EDIT:
What I am trying to accomplish is having a form that includes a collection of controls (input controls - cbo boxes, text boxes, etc), that serve as the Main record information. These are saved to a table via an INSERT statement on button_click because this form is unbound.
Next I have 8 categories that are relative per each main record (and data that goes along with it). Each of these categories could have a sub form area and a button click that bring it's relative form into the sub form area. These sub forms would be unbound as well as I would just save data via SQL statement. So i know I could accomplish this by running the insert statement from the parent form, on the main collection control's data that would create the KeyID number, then run a SQL statement that would turn around and load that KeyID number right back onto the page in a hidden text box.
Then when I click one of the sub forms and load its relative collection of controls, I could then save that data along with KeyID for each of these sub-forms/tables.
SO......
I was wondering if instead you could define these controls as a collection so that you could hide and make visible all the ones you need on button clicks and avoid the need for additional forms (subs). I know that if a user enters data into a text box, and then somewhere along the way that box becomes hidden, the data still exists in it and still ends up in the SQL statement....
So I want all these controls to exist on the same form, but I thought what is I could encapsulate them into a frame like an option group, then I could call the frame and all the relative controls would be called up (made visible) as needed.
Sorry for the long explanation but I thought it would help.
I do not think you can do it with an Option Group, but what you are describing is pretty much a subform, yesno?
Some examples of hiding the tab control from an app that went live in March 1998:
Tab driven by transparent command buttons over labels styled to look like colored command buttons:
Same approach, more buttons:
In this case, fake colored command buttons don't drive the tab, but insted show/hide the tab and a subform. In this case, the tab is actually driven by the listbox:
A view of when the tab is hidden and the subform revealed. The listbox drives navigation within the subform, which has a visible tab on it:
So, there's a lot that can be done without showing the tab control.