When you've gotten beyond writing simple macros for your own use and have started writing complete applications that several people use, you'll want to help your users accomplish tasks simply and conveniently. It's not enough to foresee the needs of the user and provide features that attend to those needs; you must also provide quick, convenient, and intuitive access to those features. Microsoft Excel offers several powerful user interface enhancements to help you effectively present features to the user: menus, toolbars, controls on worksheets or chart sheets, and controls in dialog boxes.
You use controls — such as buttons, check boxes, and list boxes — to create a custom user interface. This chapter discusses the use of controls and dialog boxes to manage the way the user interacts with your application, whereas Chapter 9, "Menus and Toolbars," discusses the use of menus and toolbars to achieve the same effect. Each of these enhancements has different advantages and disadvantages. As you design your user interface, you must decide which enhancement best suits the user's needs in a given situation.
In this chapter, you'll first get a brief overview of controls and dialog boxes and how they can enhance your application. Next, you'll learn to use simple, predefined dialog boxes and Microsoft Excel's built-in dialog boxes. Finally, you'll learn to create and use controls and custom dialog boxes.