MsgBox Function

Office VBScript

previous page next page
Microsoft® Visual Basic® Scripting Edition MsgBox Function  Language Reference 
Version 1 

See Also

Description
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.
Syntax
MsgBox(prompt[, buttons][, title][, helpfile, context])

The MsgBox function syntax has these arguments:

Part Description
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:

Constant Value Description
vbOKOnly    0 Display OK button only.
vbOKCancel    1 Display OK and Cancel buttons.
vbAbortRetryIgnore    2 Display Abort, Retry, and Ignore buttons.
vbYesNoCancel    3 Display Yes, No, and Cancel buttons.
vbYesNo    4 Display Yes and No buttons.
vbRetryCancel    5 Display Retry and Cancel buttons.
vbCritical   16 Display Critical Message icon.
vbQuestion   32 Display Warning Query icon.
vbExclamation   48 Display Warning Message icon.
vbInformation   64 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 Application modal; the user must respond to the message box before continuing work in the current application.
vbSystemModal 4096 System modal; all applications are suspended until the user responds to the message box.

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 Values
The MsgBox function has the following return values:

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

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 uses the MsgBox function to display a message box and return a value describing which button was clicked: 

Dim MyVar
MyVar = MsgBox ("Hello World!", 65, "MsgBox Example") ' MyVar contains either 1 or 2,  
                                                      ' depending on which button is 
                                                      ' clicked.

previous page start next page