Working with Dialog Boxes

Working with Dialog Boxes

Many Excel commands display a dialog box, which is simply a way of getting more information from you. For example, if you choose Review - Changes - Protect Sheet, Excel 

can’t carry out the command until you tell it what parts of the sheet you want to protect. 

Excel dialog boxes vary in the way they work. You’ll find two types of dialog boxes:

Typical dialog box:

 A modal dialog box takes the focus away from the spreadsheet.
When this type of dialog box is displayed, you can’t do anything in the worksheet
until you dismiss the dialog box. Clicking OK performs the specified actions, and
clicking Cancel (or pressing Esc) closes the dialog box without taking any action.
Most Excel dialog boxes are this type.

Stay-on-top dialog box:

 A modeless dialog box works in a manner similar to a tool￾bar. When a modeless dialog box is displayed, you can continue working in Excel,
and the dialog box remains open. Changes made in a modeless dialog box take
effect immediately. An example of a modeless dialog box is the Find and Replace
dialog box. You can leave this dialog box open while you continue to use your
worksheet. A modeless dialog box has a Close button but no OK button.

Most people fi nd working with dialog boxes to be quite straightforward and natural. If 

you’ve used other programs, you’ll feel right at home. You can manipulate the controls 

either with your mouse or directly from the keyboard.

Navigating dialog boxes

Navigating dialog boxes is generally very easy — you simply click the control you want to 

activate.

Although dialog boxes were designed with mouse users in mind, you can also use the 

keyboard. Every dialog box control has text associated with it, and this text always has 

one underlined letter (a hot key or an accelerator key). You can access the control from the 

keyboard by pressing Alt and then the underlined letter. You can also press Tab to cycle 

through all the controls on a dialog box. Pressing Shift+Tab cycles through the controls in 

reverse order.