How to select the contents of a textbox once it is activated?

Question

I have this simple Userform, where I only have TextBox1 and TextBox2. I enter some text in both of them. Assume the focus is on (the cursor is in)

Answer 1

I couldn't manage to select/highlight text in the Enter event as the the mousedown and mouseup events coming after are somewhat resetting the selection.

I think the most proper way of achieving what you want is this :

' if you want to allow highlight more then once, reset the  variable LastEntered prior to call SelectTboxText:
'       LastEntered = ""
'       SelectTboxText TextBox2


Dim LastEntered As String


' Button to select Textbox1
Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
    SelectTboxText TextBox1
End Sub

' Button to select Textbox2
Private Sub CommandButton2_Click()
    SelectTboxText TextBox2
End Sub

Private Sub TextBox1_MouseDown(ByVal Button As Integer, ByVal Shift As Integer, ByVal X As Single, ByVal Y As Single)
    SelectTboxText TextBox1
End Sub


Private Sub TextBox2_MouseDown(ByVal Button As Integer, ByVal Shift As Integer, ByVal X As Single, ByVal Y As Single)
     SelectTboxText TextBox2
End Sub


Public Sub SelectTboxText(ByRef tBox As MSForms.TextBox)

    If LastEntered <> tBox.Name Then

        LastEntered = tBox.Name

        With tBox
            .SetFocus
            .SelStart = 0
            .SelLength = Len(.Text)
        End With

    End If

End Sub

So each time you want to activate one of the textbox programmatically, you should call the sub SelectTboxText, which is not really annoying IMO. I made 2 buttons for this as an example.