by Doug Clarke (1 Submission)
Category: Custom Controls/Forms/Menus
Compatability: Visual Basic 5.0
Difficulty: Unknown Difficulty
Originally Published: Sat 29th October 2005
Date Added: Mon 8th February 2021
Rating: 
(1 Votes)
using tooltiptext more effectively
VBcoders
I have always had a love/hate relationship with tooltips. I like them as a method of conveying simple help info to a application user but realize that by default they are small and hard to read and that they can become annoying once the users has mastered the application. Recently I discovered how easy it is to change the charactoristics or the tooltips from the properties/appearance tab of the desktop.
Then I realized that by using the tag property of the controls on a form as a backup to the tooltiptext I could effectively let the user turn tooltips on and off. When my applications start I loop through the controls of a form and copy the tooltip text for each control into the tag property for that control.
Then I check to see if the user wants tooltips or not from thier saved options. If they do not I loop thru the controls and set the tooltip text to null.
If the user changes back to wanting the tooltips I copy the tag to the tooltip and they become active again. So far this has worked well. It seems that once in a while the user must restart the program to get the new setting to work but that seems like a very small trade off.
Doug Clarke
[email protected]
