I have a routine that examines thousands of records looking for discrepancies. This can take upwards of 5 minutes to complete and although I provide a progress bar and elapsed time count, I'm not sure I want to encourage folk pressing ctrl-break to quit the report should it be taking longer than expected.
A button in the progress bar won't work as the form is non-modal, so is there any neat way of allowing users to quit in this situation?
I don't think there is a way to do it like you would want it to work. VBA is a scripting language so when you start your procedure, it's gonna run until it's done. If you had another button somewhere that even WOULD let you click it while the original procedure was running, I'm not sure how you would reference that procedure and stop it.
You could do something like ask the user if they want to contine, but that would make it run even longer.
Also you could have your procedure check for a condition outside of Excel and keep running as long as it's true. Something easy might be check if a certain text file is in a folder. If you wanted the procedure to stop, open the folder and move the file. On your loop's next iteration, it wouldn't see the file and stop running. Cludgy, inefficient, and not elegant, but it would work. You could also have it check a cell, checkbox, radiobutton, basically any control in another Excel sheet running in another instance of Excel. Again cludgy.
CTRL+Break works. Accept it and move on. One neat trick about that though, is that if you password protect your code and they hit CTRL+Break, the debug option is unavailable and they will only get Continue or End.
If this is code that is run frequently, have you considered scripting something that runs it during times when a human is not using the computer? I used to run telnet screen scraping macros that would take hours to go through our widgets, but I always had them run either on a separate computer or when I wasn't there (nights/weekends).
You need DoEvents and a variable whose scope is greater than the scope of what you're running. That is, if it's just a procedure, you need a module level variable. If it's more than one module, you need a global variable. See here
Normally, the VB engine will tie up the processor until it's done. With DoEvents, however, VB allows the processor to work on whatever is next in the queue, then return to VB.