Get The Active Control In A UserForm

Recently, I had the need to find the active control on a UserForm for a dialog box I was creating for Word 2003. The problem was that most of my controls were on a MultiPage control. Whenever the active control was on the MultiPage, UserForm.ActiveControl returned the MultiPage, not the control I wanted.

My solution was to write the following function, GetActiveControl which would essentially ignore MultiPages and Frames to return the “real” active control:

Public Function GetActiveControl(ByRef Source As UserForm) As Control
Dim Ctl As Control
  Set Ctl = GetSubActiveControl(Source.ActiveControl)
  Set GetActiveControl = Ctl
End Function

Private Function GetSubActiveControl(Ctl As Control) As Control
Dim CtlType As String
  CtlType = TypeName(Ctl)
  Select Case CtlType
  Case "MultiPage"
    Set Ctl = Ctl.SelectedItem.ActiveControl
    Set Ctl = GetSubActiveControl(Ctl)
  Case "Frame"
    Set Ctl = Ctl.ActiveControl
    Set Ctl = GetSubActiveControl(Ctl)
  End Select
  Set GetSubActiveControl = Ctl
End Function


As you can see, I use a private recursive function to do the real work of finding the control. I suppose I could have done it some other way, but this seemed to be the most straightforward.