Computer Programming Concepts and Visual Basic David I. Schneider

picTable.Print “Female”; Tab(10); 364; Tab(20); 465; Tab(30); 560
picTable.Print “Total”; Tab(10); 840; Tab(20); 935; Tab(30); 1050
End Sub
[Run and then click the command button. The resulting picture box is shown.]
■ USING A MESSAGE BOX FOR OUTPUT
Sometimes you want to grab the user’s attention with a brief message such as “Correct” or “Nice
try, but no cigar.” You want this message only to appear on the screen until the user has read
it. This mission is easily accomplished with a message box such as the one shown in Figure
2-28. When a statement of the form
MsgBox prompt, , title
is executed, where prompt and title are strings, a message box with prompt displayed and the
title bar caption title appears, and stays on the screen until the user presses Enter or clicks
OK. For instance, the statement MsgBox “Nice try, but no cigar.”, , “Consolation” produces
Figure 2-28. If you use double quotation marks (“”) for title, the title bar will be blank.
FIGURE 2-28 Sample Message Box
■ LINE CONTINUATION CHARACTER
Up to 1023 characters can be typed in a line of code. If you use a line with more characters
than can fit in the window, Visual Basic scrolls the window toward the right as needed.
However, most programmers prefer having lines that are no longer than the width of the code
window. This can be achieved with the underscore character (_) preceded by a space. Make sure
the underscore doesn’t appear inside quotation marks though. For instance, the line
msg = “640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates, 1981)”
can be written as
msg = “640K ought to be enough for ” & _
“anybody. (Bill Gates, 1981)”
■ OUTPUT TO THE PRINTER
You print text on a sheet of paper in the printer in much the same way you display text in a picture
box. Visual Basic treats the printer as an object named Printer. If expr is a string or numeric
expression, then the statement
Printer.Print expr
Input and Output 55