MsgBox Function

Displays a message in a dialog box, waits for the user to click a button, and returns a value indicating which button the user clicked.

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

Arguments

• prompt
  String expression displayed as the message in the dialog box. The maximum length of prompt is approximately 1024 characters, depending on the width of the characters used. If prompt consists of more than one line, you can separate the lines using a carriage return character (Chr(13)), a linefeed character (Chr(10)), or carriage return–linefeed character combination (Chr(13) & Chr(10)) between each line.

• buttons
  Numeric expression that is the sum of values specifying the number and type of buttons to display, the icon style to use, the identity of the default button, and the modality of the message box. See Settings section for values. If omitted, the default value for buttons is 0.

• title
  String expression displayed in the title bar of the dialog box. If you omit title, the application name is placed in the title bar.

• helpfile
  String expression that identifies the Help file to use to provide context-sensitive Help for the dialog box. If helpfile is provided, context must also be provided. Not available on 16-bit platforms.

• context
  Numeric expression that identifies the Help context number assigned by the Help author to the appropriate Help topic. If context is provided, helpfile must also be provided. Not available on 16-bit platforms.

Settings

The buttons argument settings are:

The first group of values (0–5) describes the number and type of buttons displayed in the dialog box; the second group (16, 32, 48, 64) describes the icon style; the third group (0, 256, 512, 768) determines which button is the default; and the fourth group (0, 4096) determines the modality of the message box. When adding numbers to create a final value for the argument buttons, use only one number from each group.

Return Value

The MsgBox function has the following return values:

Remarks

When both helpfile and context are provided, the user can press F1 to view the Help topic corresponding to the context.

If the dialog box displays a Cancel button, pressing the ESC key has the same effect as clicking Cancel. If the dialog box contains a Help button, context-sensitive Help is provided for the dialog box. However, no value is returned until one of the other buttons is clicked.

When the MsgBox function is used with Microsoft Internet Explorer, the title of any dialog presented always contains "VBScript:" to differentiate it from standard system dialogs.

The following example illustrates the use of the MsgBox function.

result = MsgBox ("File Save Error", _
    vbAbortRetryIgnore+vbExclamation+vbDefaultButton2, "File Save Error")

Dim message

Select Case result
Case vbAbort
    message = "You chose Abort"
Case vbRetry
    message = "You chose Retry"
Case vbIgnore
    message = "You chose Ignore"
End Select

MsgBox message, vbInformation

Requirements

Version 1

See Also

Reference

InputBox Function

Change History