Page 156 - Writing Excel Macros with VBA, 2nd Edition

When the dialog box is dismissed by the user using the OK button, any appropriate actions
indicated by the fields in the dialog box are carried out. In the case of the Open dialog, this means,
of course, that the file selected by the user is actually opened in Excel. However, no actions are
taken if the user dismisses the dialog box using the Cancel button.

The Show method has syntax:

DialogObject.Show(arg1, arg2, ..., arg30)

where the arguments are used to set some dialog options.

In particular, it is possible to set some of the values on a built-in Excel dialog box using arguments
to the Show method. These arguments are listed in the Excel VBA Help file under "Built-In
Dialog Box Argument Lists." For instance, the xlDialogOpen dialog box has the following
arguments:

file_text
update_links
read_only
format
prot_ pwd
write_res_ pwd
ignore_rorec
file_origin
custom_delimit
add_logical
editable
file_access
notify_logical
converter

Hence, the code:

Application.Dialogs(xlDialogOpen).Show "*.*", False, True

displays the Open dialog, sets the "Files of type" drop-down box to All Files "*.*" so that the
dialog will display the names of all files, sets update_links to False (so that Excel links are
not automatically updated) and read_only to True (thus any file that is opened will be read-
only).

Unfortunately, Microsoft does not seem to have documented the meaning of the various
arguments. Also, the arguments are not named arguments, so we must include space for all
arguments that precede the arguments that we want to set. Thus, a trial-and-error approach seems
to be the only solution if you must set some dialog options. (Have fun.)

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