topic non-rectangular buttons in VBA Forum

non-rectangular buttons

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 08:43:15 GMT

I want to use non-rectangular buttons in my VBA form. (eg. circular, elliptical or any odd shaped polygon). How can this be done?

Re: non-rectangular buttons

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:35:21 GMT

The standard controls that come with VB & VBA are plain vanilla do not support the sorts of things you want to do.

You have two choices:

(1) use (buy) a third party control or controls suite from a vendor like Infagistics, FarPoint, DeveloperExpress, etc (peruse the ads in a Microsoft development oriented magazine like MSDN Journal). You might also look thru the products on a site like Programmers Paradise. Unless your requirements are really odd, there should be a product that will does what you want.

(2) you can write your own User Controls -- but this is a tedious, specialized and somewhat advanced programming task. Look thru building User Controls in any comprehensive VB reference or "how-to" book. Personally, I would do this only as a very last resort.

Hope this helps.

Victor

Re: non-rectangular buttons

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:06:47 GMT

I believe you are asking to take a region and creat a skin. This is a technique for irregular forms and buttons.

Google irregular buttons. You can also look for SetWindowRgn and CreateEllipticRgn API's which might help you.

one thing though...I believe after you have applied this technique an Elliptical button will still have a rectanglular boundary that the user can click while the skin looks elliptical.

Never tried this with VBA so get back to the group with your findings.

G'Luck,

Bob Coward