Components dialog in the VBE

[isladogs]

This is a curiosity I discovered by accident several years ago. I've raised it at several other forums since that time but never had any response to the question. Perhaps this time will be different

If you open the VBE and press Ctrl+T, a Components dialog appears with two tabs: Controls & Designers.





From the appearance of the dialog this has been around a long time. In fact, exactly the same dialog can be found going back to A2000 if not earlier. It also appears if you open the VBE of any other Office program such as Word & Excel.

However, what is its purpose (if any)?
The Controls part shows a list similar to the Access reference list but not identical to it.
The Designers list just contains two items.
I cannot get anything to happen when I click on any item in the dialog

EDIT: Added screenshots that I couldn't do when posting thread

[NeoPa]

I've never seen that myself either.

It looks like a way of configuring what's available from the ToolBox when designing forms but I'll give it some further thought & post back if I discover anything.

[isladogs]

Thanks for replying. I asked the same question in the past at UA, SO & AWF. Between those 3 forums I got one reply! Nobody so far has any idea.

For info, I discovered it about 3 years ago when I first installed Office 365 on a Windows tablet. At that time, the VBE toolbar did not appear when in tablet mode. I tried various things none of which helped before clicking Ctrl+T (for tablet) as a random guess...with that unexpected result

To get the VBE toolbar to appear, it was necessary to switch off tablet mode

The good news is that I reported the issue with the VBE toolbar to MS and it was fixed a few months later.

[NeoPa]

Would you consider Components dialog box to be an adequate response?

[isladogs]

Hi Ade
Thanks
I hadn't seen that article before but what it outlines is exactly what I had tried to implement.
I think its a legacy from MDB days and is/was intended to be used with the MS Forms 2.0 library.

However, I was unable to alter the 'toolbox' by ticking any of the control checkboxes. The ribbon controls are definitely not affected.
Ticking MS Forms on the Designers tab also has no effect that I can see.

Perhaps I need to try it again with an old version like A2K

[NeoPa]

That doesn't sound good. I certainly saw it was still there in my copy of Access 2019. I may need to put a question in to the team. I'll let you know what I find out - or someone else may post is always a possibility.

[isladogs]

Thanks
The article was written in 2018 so it should still be active ... perhaps I'm just not doing it correctly.
As I said this is more a curiosity than something essential...but its odd that none of us seem to know what its actual purpose is.

[NeoPa]

It appears that the Components dialog is for managing items available on MS UserForms. Something seen in other applications that use VBA more than in Access so much because Access has its own (better?) forms as standard.

It's still there because the VBA IDE is essentially Application Agnostic. It's possible to use them in Access - just not much point ;-)

[isladogs]

Thanks Ade.
I think that confirms what I was suggesting in post #5.

[ADezii]

I'm not sure if this is relevant or not, but I use the Components Dialog Box extensively in Visual Basic. The Items listed in this Dialog Box include all Registered ActiveX Controls, Insertable Objects, and ActiveX Designers. You can select one or more Options within the Controls, Designers, or Insertable Objects Tabs, then click OK. After closing the Components Dialog Box, all of the ActiveX Controls that were selected will now appear in the Toolbox, where they can then placed on a Form. Clearing the Check Box next to a Component will remove it from the Toolbox unless an Instance of it is being used on any Form in the Project. Obviously, the same functionality does not exist in Access, maybe it is simply a throwback to Visual Basic. To the best of my knowledge, selecting a Control(s) from the Controls Tab, then OK within the Excel VBA Environment, will NOT list that Control in the Toolbox.

[isladogs]

Hi @adezii$
That behaviour was what I was expecting with regard to the user form toolbox in e.g. Excel but, like you, I've had no luck with it in any Office program so far. Yet the article that Ade found suggests it should work with Office VBA
I haven't used VB for at least a decade. However, from your description, the VB version of the Components toolbox has additional functionality compared to that in the VBE