Excel VBA MsgBox

Excel VBA MsgBox (Table of Contents)

• VBA MsgBox in Excel
• How to Create VBA MSGBox in Excel?

VBA MsgBox in Excel

VBA MsgBox is popup style dialog box on your Excel window which show a specific message. To make the code more interactive, most of the VBA programmers use it in their macro codes

VBA Message Box (VBA MsgBox) is an inbuilt dialog box window which displays or shows a message alert box containing an optional set of buttons, icon and other arguments settings

Different parts of the VBA message box

1. Message box Title: It is typically used to display what the VBA message box is about. If you don’t specify anything, it displays the application name which is “Microsoft Excel” by default in this case.
2. Prompt or message text: It is the text message or string which you want to convey through the message box to the user. i.e message that you want to display.
3. Button(s): OK is the default button, where you can customize it to show two or more buttons such as Yes/No, Retry/Ignore, Yes/No/Cancel
4. Close Icon: It is used to close the VBA message box by clicking on X symbol i.e Close icon.

Syntax for VBA MsgBox Function

MsgBox prompt, [buttons],[title],[helpfile],[context]

Or

=MSGBOX(Text_String , [buttons] ,[title], [helpfile, context])

Where,

• Prompt or Text_String – This is a required parameter or argument. It displays the message that you see in the MsgBox. In our example, the text “This is my first Programme” is the ‘prompt’. You must always enclose the text string in double quotes and limitation is 1,024 characters. This space can be used to write a single or multiple line text or you can even display tables/data.
• [buttons] – It is an optional argument, which indicates the number and type of buttons which you want to display in the VBA MsgBox. Eg., suppose if you enter “0” as a number or integral value (Button parameter constant) or use vbOkOnly, it will show OK button only in MsgBox
• [title] – It is an optional argument, this is displayed at the top in the title bar of the VBA MsgBox. If you don’t enter any parameter or left blank in the title argument, then by default it will show an application name i.e. “Microsoft Excel”
• [helpfile] – It is an optional argument, it’s a string expression which path to help. If you’re using a help file argument in VBA MsgBox syntax, then you need to enter context argument and vice versa
• [context] – It is an optional argument, it is a numeric expression i.e. Help context number assigned to the appropriate Help topic.

Note: The arguments mentioned in the square brackets are optional. Only the first parameter i.e. ‘prompt’ argument is mandatory & you can ignore the [helpfile] and [context] arguments which are rarely used

Constants for VBA MsgBox

Buttons and icons are a combination of the Buttons argument which is a unique value that drives the output to users to check out button combinations:

VBA MsgBox Styles

20 Button parameter constants

It is used based on the requirement & to make the VBA message box interactive

Constant	Value	Description
vbOKOnly	0	To Display OK button only.
vbOKCancel	1	To Display OK and Cancel buttons.
vbAbortRetryIgnore	2	To Display Abort, Retry, and Ignore buttons.
vbYesNoCancel	3	To Display Yes, No, and Cancel buttons.
vbYesNo	4	To Display Yes and No buttons.
vbRetryCancel	5	To Display Retry and Cancel buttons.
vbCritical	16	To Display Critical Message icon.
vbQuestion	32	To Display Warning Query icon.
vbExclamation	48	To Display Warning Message icon.
vbInformation	64	To Display Information Message icon.
vbDefaultButton1	0	First button is default.
vbDefaultButton2	256	Second button is default.
vbDefaultButton3	512	Third button is default.
vbDefaultButton4	768	Fourth button is default.
vbApplicationModal	0	In this Scenario, the user must or should respond to the message box before continuing work in the current application.
vbSystemModal	4096	In this Scenario, All applications are suspended until the user responds to the message box.
vbMsgBoxHelpButton	16384	It Adds a Help button to the message box.
VbMsgBoxSetForeground	65536	It indicates or Specifies the message box window as the foreground window.
vbMsgBoxRight	524288	It is based on the Alignment, Here, the text is right aligned.
vbMsgBoxRtlReading	1048576	It indicates or Specifies text should appear as right-to-left reading on Hebrew and Arabic systems.

The following applies to the VBA MsgBox Function when the user clicks a button returning a unique value.

Constant	Value	Description
vbOK	1	OK
vbCancel	2	Cancel
vbAbort	3	Abort
vbRetry	4	Retry
vbIgnore	5	Ignore
vbYes	6	Yes
vbNo	7	No

How to Create VBA MSGBox in Excel?

Let us now see how to create VBA MsgBox in Excel with the help of an example.

To Create vbOKOnly (Default) VBA message box follow the below steps

1. Open a VBA Editor window

Select or click on Visual Basic in the Code group on the Developer tab or you can directly click on Alt + F11 shortcut key

Now, you can see VBA Editor window, under the project window, in VBA project, you can see work file listed (i.e. Sheet1 (VBA MsgBox Example)

2. Create a module

To create a blank module, right click on Microsoft Excel objects, in that click on Insert and under the menu section select Module, where the blank module gets created

3. Creating a VBA message box

Now the blank module is created, it is also called a code window, where you need to type Sub myfirstprogram() as the first message without any quotes around it. Now, you can observe, Excel automatically adds the line End Sub below the first message line when you press Enter.

Now, all the codes which you enter must be between these two lines, now you can start typing MsgBox function or syntax.

Once you start typing msgbox and leave a space, automatically syntax help feature appears

Now, I enter only the Prompt argument i.e. “this is my first programme” remaining syntax or argument, I set it as a default

Now, the code is ready,

Sub myfirstprogram()
MsgBox "this is my first programme"
End Sub

you can run the macro by clicking the Run Sub button (i.e. green “play” button) or by pressing F5.

The VBA message box popup window appears

Similarly, you can create different types of Message Boxes available in Excel VBA i.e. you can add a title, select a different button argument of your choice & multiple lines of text

VBA message box macro code with title & button argument

Sub mysecondprogram()
MsgBox "this is my first programme", vbOKCancel, "WELCOME TO VBA"
End Sub

Run the code by pressing F5. The VBA message box with title and button popup window appears

Save Macro code

Save your workbook as “Excel macro-enabled workbook”. Press Crl + S, then a popup appears, in that select or click on “No” button

“Save as” window popup appears, now you can save this file as Excel Macro-Enabled workbook

Once again if you open a file, you can click on shortcut key i.e. ALT +F8, “Macro” dialog box appears, where you can run a saved macro code of your choice

Things to Remember About the VBA MsgBox in Excel

• VBA message box is extremely useful when you are debugging
• You have an option to insert VBA MsgBox anywhere in your code
• VBA MsgBox will help you out when you want to ask the user a query.

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