Project

I got a question from someone who wanted to create a userform which would set some values in project. It was to be populated by some preset values. So here are the basics:

The first thing to do is to create a form. Going to the Visual Basic editor, you would choose "Insert / UserForm". This creates a blank userform and should display the toolbox.

Drag a combo box from the toolbox onto the form. It will be called "ComboBox1" if it is the first one. You can rename it using properties (and you should) but for this example we are not.

Now to write some code for the form. Hit F7 or go to the view menu and select "Code". This should bring up a window which you can type code in. The first thing is some code which will initialize the values for the combo box. I've called this simply "InitializeME" but name it what you like. The code in this sub has one line for each value you want to add. Here the values are hardcoded, but you could substitute it with code which reads values from a file stored somewhere or an array of values you have gathered from the project file itself. You are limited only by your imagination. Here is the code:

Sub InitializeME()
'Create your list
ComboBox1.AddItem "Foo"
ComboBox1.AddItem "Faa"
ComboBox1.AddItem "Fay"
ComboBox1.AddItem "Fat"
ComboBox1.AddItem "Fun"
'Set the initial value. Without this it will be blank
ComboBox1.Value = "Select a Value"
End Sub

Next you need some code to start the form. To keep this example pathetically simple we will only do two things here, initialize the combo box values and then show the form. You could do it the other way around, but better to have the form ready to go when the user first sees the form.

To do this insert a module (again from the insert menu). Then call the code to initialize the combo box, then show the form. The code is very simple:

sub ShowTheUserFormAlreadyPlease()
UserForm1.InitializeME
UserForm1.Show
end sub

You can run the code now. Go to tools macros and select the ShowTheUserFormAlreadyPlease macro. The form should display and have a working combo box. Of course it does NOTHING right now. So the next thing is to look at the methods of the combo box and see what it can do. If you look at the top of the code window you see on the left a box which says "ComboBox1". This selects an object to work on. On the right is a box which says "Change". This is a list of procedures associated with that object.

With the combo box selected on the left and the "change" procedure selected on the right the shell of a procedure will open and we will type code into it. This code sets the text1 field of selected tasks to the value that is selected in the combo box. When you change the combo box value it will run. Selecting a value in the combo box counts as a change. Here is the code:

Private Sub ComboBox1_Change()
If Not ComboBox1.Value = "Select a Value" Then
ActiveSelection.Tasks.Text1 = ComboBox1.Value
End If
End Sub

The only trick in there is the if then statement so that the text1 value does not change when you are setting the value of the combo box when it first displays. The code that you can put in the procedure again is only limited by what you can imagine. It could be extensive and create and initialize a new project with default values etc. As much as you are capable of.

Warning: I have not shown any error handling here. If you had no tasks selected you would have gotten an error or if there was no project open or ... so be careful and write procedures to handle that. And always test against whatever scenarios you can imagine.