Question

I’m building a UserForm in Excel VBA for simple data entry (i.e. surveys). The surveys are in the basic “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” format. Each respondent has 8 options per question (“1”-“5” for the agreement rankings, “99” for N/A, and “88” should the respondent choose not to answer). To improve the speed and accuracy of the data entry process, I need my UserForm to only allow only those integers in the textboxes.

I’ve messed around with KeyPress, but have run into some trouble with the double digit entries. Here’s what I had:

Private Sub textbox1_KeyPress(ByVal KeyAscii As MSForms.ReturnInteger)
Select Case KeyAscii
    Case Asc("1") To Asc ("5")
    Case Asc("88")
    Case Asc("99")
    Case Else
        KeyAscii = 0
End Select
End Sub

This worked alright, except that it’s not perfect, in that it also allows invalid entries such as, “11” – “15”, “81” – “85”, and so forth. I’ve spent a good two weeks looking around the internet for something and haven’t found anything. Surely there is a simple way to validate these textboxes the way I’m asking, but I just can’t seem to figure it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Just let me know if anyone needs more of the code. Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Just check the value after they leave the field

Private Sub textbox1_Exit(ByVal Cancel As MSForms.ReturnBoolean)
    Dim sValue As String
    Dim bInvalid As Boolean
    bInvalid = True
    sValue = Trim(Me.textbox1.Text)
    If sValue = "1" Or sValue = "2" Or sValue = "3" Or sValue = "4" Or sValue = "5" Or sValue = "99" Or sValue = "88" Then
        bInvalid = False
    End If
    If bInvalid Then
        MsgBox "Please enter a valid value"
    End If
End Sub

Here is a solution that utlizes the submit button to validate (commandbutton1), per your recent comments. In the click method it loops through the controls and checks to see if it is a textbox, if so it passes the textbox to be validated. If it fails validation it will set focus back to the control, you may wish to add a message box so the user knows that it failed.

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
Dim cntrol As Control
'loop through all the controls
For Each cntrol In Me.Controls
    'check to see if it is a textbox
    If TypeOf cntrol Is MSForms.TextBox Then
        Dim tBox As MSForms.TextBox
        Set tBox = cntrol
        'we have a textbox so validate the entry
        If validateTextBox(tBox) Then
            'did not validate so set focus on the control
            'HERE IS WHERE YOU MAY WISH TO PROVIDE A MESSAGE TO THE USER
            cntrol.SetFocus
            'release the object
            Set tBox = Nothing
            'exit as we do not need to process further
            Exit Sub
        End If
        Set tBox = Nothing
    End If
Next
End Sub




'validate a textbox's value and return true or false
Private Function validateTextBox(tb As MSForms.TextBox) As Boolean
    Dim sValue As String
    Dim bInvalid As Boolean
    bInvalid = True
    sValue = Trim(tb.Text)
    If sValue = "1" Or sValue = "2" Or sValue = "3" Or sValue = "4" Or sValue = "5" Or sValue = "99" Or sValue = "88" Then
        bInvalid = False
    End If
    'return the results
    validateTextBox = bInvalid
End Function