EnableCancelKey Property

Microsoft Excel Visual Basic

EnableCancelKey Property

       

Controls how Microsoft Excel handles CTRL+BREAK (or ESC or COMMAND+PERIOD) user interruptions to the running procedure. Read/write XlEnableCancelKey.

XlEnableCancelKey can be one of these XlEnableCancelKey constants.
xlDisabled. Cancel key trapping is completely disabled.
xlErrorHandler. The interrupt is sent to the running procedure as an error, trappable by an error handler set up with an On Error GoTo statement. The trappable error code is 18.
xlInterrupt. The current procedure is interrupted, and the user can debug or end the procedure.

expression.EnableCancelKey

expression   Required. An expression that returns one of the objects in the Applies To list.

Remarks

Use this property very carefully. If you use xlDisabled, there's no way to interrupt a runaway loop or other non – self-terminating code. Likewise, if you use xlErrorHandler but your error handler always returns using the Resume statement, there's no way to stop runaway code.

The EnableCancelKey property is always reset to xlInterrupt whenever Microsoft Excel returns to the idle state and there's no code running. To trap or disable cancellation in your procedure, you must explicitly change the EnableCancelKey property every time the procedure is called.

Example

This example shows how you can use the EnableCancelKey property to set up a custom cancellation handler.

On Error GoTo handleCancel
Application.EnableCancelKey = xlErrorHandler
MsgBox "This may take a long time: press ESC to cancel"
For x = 1 To 1000000    ' Do something 1,000,000 times (long!)
    ' do something here
Next x

handleCancel:
If Err = 18 Then
    MsgBox "You cancelled"
End If