Walkthrough: Display text in a text box in a worksheet using a button

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This walkthrough shows the basics of using buttons and text boxes on Microsoft Office Excel worksheets, and how to create Excel projects using Office development tools in Visual Studio. To see the result as a completed sample, see the Excel Controls Sample at Office development samples and walkthroughs.

Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects for Excel. For more information, see Features available by Office application and project type.

During this walkthrough, you will learn how to:

  • Add controls to a worksheet.

  • Populate a text box when a button is clicked.

  • Test your project.

Note

Your computer might show different names or locations for some of the Visual Studio user interface elements in the following instructions. The Visual Studio edition that you have and the settings that you use determine these elements. For more information, see Personalize the Visual Studio IDE.

Prerequisites

You need the following components to complete this walkthrough:

Create the project

In this step, you will create an Excel Workbook project using Visual Studio.

To create a new project

  1. Create an Excel Workbook project with the name My Excel Button. Make sure that Create a new document is selected. For more information, see How to: Create Office projects in Visual Studio.

    Visual Studio opens the new Excel workbook in the designer and adds the My Excel Button project to Solution Explorer.

Add controls to the worksheet

For this walkthrough, you will need a button and a text box on the first worksheet.

To add a button and a text box

  1. Verify that the My Excel Button.xlsx workbook is open in the Visual Studio designer, with Sheet1 displayed.

  2. From the Common Controls tab of the Toolbox, drag a TextBox to Sheet1.

  3. From the View menu, select Properties Window.

  4. Be sure that TextBox1 is visible in the Properties window drop-down box and change the Name property of the text box to displayText.

  5. Drag a Button control onto Sheet1 and change the following properties:

    Property Value
    Name insertText
    Text Insert Text

    Now write the code to run when the button is clicked.

Populate the text box when the button is clicked

Each time the user clicks the button, Hello World! is appended to the text box.

To write to the text box when the button is clicked

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click Sheet1, and then click View Code on the shortcut menu.

  2. Add the following code to the Click event handler of the button:

    private void insertText_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    this.displayText.Text += "Hello World! ";
}

  3. In C#, you must add an event handler to the Startup event as shown below. For information on creating event handlers, see How to: Create event handlers in Office projects.

    this.insertText.Click += new EventHandler(insertText_Click);

Test the application

You can now test your workbook to make sure that the message Hello World! appears in the text box when you click the button.

To test your workbook

  1. Press F5 to run your project.

  2. Click the button.

  3. Confirm that Hello World! appears in the text box.

Next steps

This walkthrough shows the basics of using buttons and text boxes on Excel worksheets. Here are some tasks that might come next:

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