When you add a control to the work area in Microsoft Excel
or to a form in Microsoft Visual Basic, it assumes a
position on its container. If you want, you can change that location by moving
the control.
To move a control, click it and drag in the direction of your choice.
To move a group of controls, first select them. Click it and drag the selection in the direction of your choice
When a control has been selected, as your mouse moves over
it, its pointer displays a different cursor.
One of these
To move a control, click its border and hold the mouse down,
drag in the direction of your choice. When you get to the desired location, release
the mouse.
You can also position one or more controls in the middle of
the form. To do that, select the control, then, on the main menu of Visual
Basic, click Format -> Center In Form -> Vertically.
When many controls are selected on a form, one of the
controls has dark handles:
In our descriptions, the control with the dark handles will
be referred to as the base control.
During form design, to better position the controls, you can
use the main menu with the Format group. Microsoft Visual Basic also provides
the UserForm toolbar to assist you. To display the UserForm toolbar, on the main
menu of Microsoft Visual Basic, you can click View -> Toolbars ->
UserForm.
If you have a certain control on the form and want to
position it exactly at equal distance between the left and the right borders of
the form, select the control, then, on the main menu of Microsoft Visual Basic, click
Format -> Center in Form -> Horizontally. To get the same option, on the
UserForm toolbar, click the arrow of the Center button and click Horizontally:
Horizontal alignment affects controls whose distance from
the left border of the form must be the same. To perform this type of
alignment, you can use the main menu where you would click Format -> Align,
and select one of the following
options:
To get the same options using the UserForm toolbar, click
the arrow of the Align button and select the desired option: Lefts, Centers, or
Rights:
Another option you have consists of moving controls up or
down for better alignment. Once again you must first select the controls. Then, on the main menu,
click Format -> Align, and click one of the following options:
To get the same options using the UserForm toolbar, click
the arrow of the Align button and select the desired option: Tops, Middles, or
Bottoms.
Suppose you have a group of horizontally aligned controls as
follows:
Obviously the controls on this form are not enjoying the most
professional look. The Format group of the main menu allows you to
specify a better horizontal alignment of controls with regards to each other. To
use it, first select the controls. Then, on the main menu of Microsoft Visual Basic, click
Format -> Horizontal Spacing, and click one of the following options:
Suppose you have a group of horizontally aligned controls as
follows:
The controls on this form are not
professionally positioned with regards to each other. Once again, the Format group of the main menu allow you to
specify a better vertical alignment of controls relative to each other. To align
them, on the main menu of Microsoft Visual Basic, click Format -> Vertical Spacing and click one of the
following options:
If you click a control’s button on the Toolbox and click
a UserForm, the control assumes a default width. The width of a control is
the distance from its left to its right borders.
To visual specify the width of a control, click it, position
the mouse on one of its left or right handle until the mouse cursor appears with
a horizontal bar with two arrows
 .
Then click and drag left or right in the direction of your choice. When you get
the desired with, release the mouse.
The distance from the left border to the right border of a control is referred to as its
Width property.
Therefore, to specify the width of a control with
precision, click the control. In the Properties window, click Width and type the
desired value. To programmatically specify the width of a control, access it
using its name, type the period, followed by Width, the assignment
operator, and the desired value.
If a control displays or contains text, such as the caption
of a button, click the control. On the main menu of Microsoft Visual Basic,
click Format and click Size to Fit.
Instead of one, you can also resize a group of controls at
the same time. To enlarge or shrink many controls, select them.
Position the mouse on the left or right handle of one of the selected controls to get the
desired cursor
. Click and drag
left or right until you get the desired widths, then release the mouse.
Consider the
following form:
Imagine you would like each of these buttons to have
just
enough space to accommodate its caption. First
select the controls that will be resized. To resize the controls, on the
main
menu of Microsoft Visual Basic, click Format and click Size to Fit. If
you do, the controls will be resized based on the contents of
their value:
If all the controls are text boxes, their widths would be
reduced to be able to hold a character.
Consider the following form:
Imagine one of the controls has a certain width and you want
to apply that width to the other controls. Select the controls but make as the
base control the object that has the width you want. Here is an example where
the button labeled Order Processing is selected as the base:
On the main menu, you can click Format -> Make Same Size
-> Width. Alternatively, on the UserForm toolbar, you can click the arrow of
the right button and click Width:
After doing this, the controls would be enlarged or narrowed
based on the width of the control that was set as the base:
The height of a control is the distance from its top to its
bottom borders. This can be illustrated as follows:
To visual specify the height of a control, click it, position
the mouse on one of its top or bottom handle until the mouse cursor appears with
a vertisal bar with two arrows
 .
Then click and drag up or down in the direction of your choice until you get the
desired height. Then release the mouse.
To specify the width of a control with precision, click the
control. In the Properties window, click Height and type the desired value. To
programmatically specify the height of a control, access it using its name, type
the period, followed by Height, followed by =, and the desired value.
If a control displays or contains text, such as the caption
of a button, click the control. On the main menu of Microsoft Visual Basic,
click Format and click Size to Fit.
To programmatically specify the height of a control, type
its name, access its Height property and assign the desired value.
You can resize many controls at the same time. To do this,
select the controls.
Position the mouse on the top or bottom handle of one of the selected controls to get the
desired cursor
. Click and drag
up or down. All of the selected controls
would be resized.
You can shrink or heighten many controls based on the height
of one of the controls. To start, select the controls but use as base the
control that has the height you would like to apply on the other controls. Here
is an example where the button labeled Get is set as the base:
On the main menu, you can click Format -> Make Same Size
-> Height. Or, on the UserForm toolbar, you can click the arrow of the right
button and click Height.
After doing this, the controls would get shrunk or tall
based on the width of the control that was set as the base:
Instead of separately setting the width or the height of a
control or a group of controls, you can specify both pieces of information at the
same time.
To visually specify both the width and the height of a
control:
When you get to the desired position, release the mouse.
To resume, to resize a control, click it to select it.
Position the mouse on a border, a handle, or a corner of the selected control.
Use the appropriate mouse cursor:
Imagine you have added three controls to a form and the
design appears as follows:
To visually resize various controls, first select them.
Position the mouse on the border or corner of one of the selected controls until
you get the cursor that would resize to the direction of your choice:
Click and drag in the direction of your choice:
Once you get the desired size, release the mouse.
To precisely change the sizes of various controls at the
same time, first select them. Then, in the Properties window, change the values of the
Width
and Height properties. The new value would be applied to all selected controls. Alternatively,
Microsoft Visual Basic provides tools to automatically do this for you.
If you had applied some design on a control and you want to
replicate that design, you can copy the control. This is mostly a simple
operation of copy n' paste. You can copy a control on the work area or on a form and
paste it on the same container (you are not allowed to copy a control from the work
area to a form and vice versa). You can also copy a control from one work area
and paste it in another work area.
You can copy a control from one form and
paste it in another form.
When you copy and paste a control, there are some characteristics it
would retain and some others it would loose. Normally, it would keep its
aesthetic characteristics (such as the color) and its size but it will loose
some others (such as its location and its programmatic characteristics such as
its name.
To copy a control:
To copy a group of controls, first select the controls:
To paste the copied controls, in the work area or on a form:
If you have added a control to the work area or a form but you don't need it anymore, you can remove it
from the container. You can also delete a group of controls in one step.
To remove a control from a work area or from a form:
To remove a group of controls, select them:
When using the controls of a form, you can press Tab to move from one control to another. For example, after
entering a value in a text box of a form, if there is another
text box on the right side, when you press Tab, the caret should move to
that right control. If there is no control on the right side, the caret should
move to the control under the one previously used. If the caret or focus is in
the last bottom control on a form and you press Tab, the caret should
move back to the first record. This follows the arranged sequence of the controls on the form. For this
reason, the controls on a form should be aligned in the order of a logical
sequence.
When you add a control to a form that already has
other
controls, it is sequentially positioned at the end of the existing
controls. The sequence of controls navigation is set using the Tab
Order dialog box. To access the Tab Order dialog box:
Every object used in a computer must have a name.
This
allows you and the operating system to know at any time what
object you
are referring to. When you add a new control to the work area in
Microsoft
Excel or to a form in Microsoft Visual Basic, the object receives a
default name. For example, the first CommandButton you add is
named CommandButton1. If you add another button, it would be named
CommandButton2, and so on. The default name assigned may not
be indicative enough for the role a control is playing, especially
when
you use many controls on the same container.
Therefore, you should assign your own custom names to the controls
you use.
In the Properties window, the name of a control is
represented with the (Name) field. To change the name of a control, click
(Name) and type the desired name. There are rules you must follow when
naming your controls. The name of a control:
Based on these rules, you can adapt your own.
Some controls display a border when they are drawn and some
others don't. Some of these controls allow you to specify a type of border
you want to show surrounding the control. This characteristic is controlled by
the BorderStyle property.
Some controls are text-based, meaning they are meant to display or
sometimes request text from the user.
For such controls, this text is
referred to as caption while it is simply called text for some other
controls. This property is not available for all controls.
If a control displays text, it may have a property called Caption in the Properties window.
After adding such a control to a work area or a form, its Caption field would
display the same text as its name. At design time, to change the caption of the control, click its
Caption field in the Properties window and type the desired value.
For most controls, there are no strict rules to follow for this text.
Therefore, it is your responsibility to
type the right value. Some other controls have this property named Text.
For such a control, when you add it to a work area or a form, its Text field in
the Properties window may be empty.
If you want, you can click the Text field
and type the desired text.
The text provided in Caption or a Text
field of a text-based control can only be set “as isâ€
at design time. If you want the text to change while the application is
running, you can format it. For example, such a control can display the
current time or the name of the user who is logged in. These format
attributes cannot be set at
design time. To change the text of a text-based control at run time,
either assign a simple string or provide a formatted string to
the Caption or the Text property.
If a control is text-based, when you provide text to
it or when you type text in it, by default, text is positioned to
the left side of the control. This is appropriate if the value entered is
a string (regular text). In some cases, such as numbers, you may prefer
the value to be position in the center or on the right side of the
control. This characteristic is referred to as the alignment of text. Once
again, not all controls have this option.
The ability to control the alignment of text is done
through the TextAlign property:
It provides three options:
To programmatically specify the text alignment of a control
that supports this characteristics, assign the desired option to this property.
Here is an example:
TextBox1.TextAlign = fmTextAlignRight
The font specify what face, size, and style a control should
use to display its text. To specify or change the font of a control, click it to
select in. In the Properties window, click Font and click the browse button
 .
This would display the Font dialog box:
From this dialog box, you can select the font name, the
style, the size, and the effect(s). Once you are ready, click OK.
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Practical Learning: Introducing
Controls Design
.
Click and drag in the direction of your choice
We saw when you add a control to the work area
or to a form, it gets a default position. After adding the control, it
is positioned in the body of the parent using a Cartesian coordinate
system whose origin is located on the top-left corner of the parent
window. If the parent is the work area in Microsoft Excel, the origin is
under
the small boxes under the Formula Bar:
If you create a form in Microsoft Visual Basic, the origin
of its location is located just under the title bar
to the left:
The horizontal measurements move from the origin to the right. The vertical measurements move from the origin to the
bottom. The location of a control is
both:
In the Properties window, the distance between the top
border of the work area or of the form and the top border of the control is represented by
the Top property. The distance between the left border of the form and the left border of the control is represented by the Left
property:
 
To move a control with precision, click it to select
it and access its Properties window. In the Properties window, change
either or both the
Left
and the Top values. To programmatically specify the location of a
control,
access its using its name. Then access its Width or its Height
properties and assign the desired value.
We saw different ways of visually resizing a control. As
seen already, the width of a control is
the distance from its left to its right borders:
The width of a control is represented by the
Width property. Therefore, to specify the width of a control with
precision, access it
using its name, type the period, followed by Width, the assignment
operator, and the desired value.
As described already, the height of a control is the distance from its top to its
bottom borders:
To programmatically specify the height of a control, access it using its name, type
the period, followed by Height, followed by =, and the desired value.
Colors are used to paint something about a control. For
example, you can change the color of a control or just the color of the text
that a control is displaying. Both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Visual Basic
support colors at various levels.
To visual change a color, you can use the Properties window.
In the Properties window, the fields that support the color options are provided
as a combo box. When you click the arrow of the combo box, a window made of two
parts would display:
The color window is divided in two property pages labeled
Palette and System. The Palette property page is probably the easiest section to
specify a color because it provides small boxes that each shows its color. The
colors are represented each by a name. Those are official names recognized by
the Microsoft Windows operating systems but you should not use those colors in
your code.
To programmatically support colors, Microsoft Visual Basic
provided two systems. Microsoft Visual Basic provides a few constants values you
can use as colors. These contants are:
As you can see, this is a limited list. Obviously there
should be other ways to specify a color. In Microsoft Windows operating systems,
a color is recognized as a number made of three parts. The first part is small
number that ranges from 0 to 255. This part represents the red section. The
second part also is a number from 0 to 255 and represents the green value.The
third part also is a number from 0 to 255 and represents the blue part. To
support this, the Visual Basic language provides a function named RGB and whose
syntax is:
Function RGB(Red As Byte, Green As Byte, Blue As Byte) As Long
This function takes three arguments. Each argument should be
a number between 0 and 255. If the arguments are valid, the function would
produce a Long value that represents a color recognized by Microsoft Windows.
Here is an example:
BackColor = RGB(28,174, 77)
As mentioned already, the RGB() function produces a Long
integer that represents a color. If you already know the number that represents
the color, you can use it as the color. For example, you can assign it to the
colored property. Here is an example:
BackColor = 4912394
This number is provided in decimal format. As an
alternative, you can provide it in hexadecimal format. Here is an example:
BackColor = &HF420DD
When you add a new control to a work area or a form, the
control is painted with a certain color but this depends on the control. The
background color of a control is the color used to paint the surface of the
control.
To change the
background color of a control, first select it. In the Properties window, click BackColor
and select the desired color.
To make its text visible, a control shows it in a certain
that, by default, is black. If you want, you can change that color.
To support the color used to display its text, each control
is equipped with a property named ForeColor. Therefore, to visually change the
color of text of a control, select that control. In the Properties window, click
ForeColor and select the desired color. Here are examples:
To programmatically specify or change the text color of a
control, access it. Then access its ForeColor property and assign it the desired
color.
Almost every control has a border. This shows where the
control starts and where it ends. The controls that show a border paint it with
a certain color. Most controls that have a border use a type of 3-D effect. This
depends on the control. To control the color of the border of a control, click
it to select it. In the Properties window, click BorderColor and select the
desired color. To programmatically specify or change the border color of a
control, assign the desired color to its BorderColor property.
You can navigate through controls using the Tab key. When
that key is pressed, the focus moves from one control to the next. By their
designs, not all controls can receive focus and not all controls can participate
in tab navigation. Even controls that can receive focus must be
primarily included in the tab sequence.
The participation to tab sequence is controlled by the Boolean
TabStop property in the
Properties window. Every visual control that can receive focus is already configured to have this property set to
True. If you want to remove a control from this sequence, set its TabStop value to
False.
If a control has the TabStop property set to True, to arrange the navigation order of controls,
you can click a control on the form. Then, in the
Properties window, set or change the value of its TabIndex field. The value must be a positive
natural number.
A control is referred to as visible if it can be visually located on the screen.
You can use a control only if you can see it.
You have the role of deciding whether a control must be seen or not and when.
The visibility of an object is controlled by the its Visible
property.
At design time, when you add a control to the work
area or to a form, it is visible by default. This is because its
Visible property is set to True in the
Properties window. If you don't want a control to primarily appear when the form comes up, you can set its
Visible property to False.
To be able to use a control, it must allow
operations on it.
For example, if a control is supposed to receive text, you can
enter
characters in it only if this is made possible. To make a control
available, the object must be enabled. The availability of an object is
controlled
by the Enabled property.
By default, after adding a control to a form, it is enabled and
its Enabled property in the Properties window is set to True. An
enabled control displays its text or other characteristics in their normal settings.
If you want to disable a control, set its Enabled property to False.
On a form that has many controls, at one particular
time, only one control
can receive input from the user. The control that is currently receiving
input or actions from the user is said to have focus.
To give focus to a control, the user can
click the
intended control or press Tab a few times until the control
receives
focus. To programmatically give focus to a control, type the name
of the control, followed by the period operator, followed by
the SetFocus method. An example would be:
Private Sub Example()
txtAddress.SetFocus
End Sub
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