vba - InfoBox.Popup Refuses to Close on Timer Expiration

Question

Cobbled this test procedure together in an Outlook 2013 module from other posts, which should display a popup box, and then automatically close after 3 seconds. Problem is it never closes.

Sub MessageBoxTimer()
    Dim AckTime As Integer, InfoBox As Object
    Set InfoBox = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

    AckTime = 3
    Select Case InfoBox.Popup("Click OK (this window closes automatically after 3 seconds).", _
    AckTime, "This is your Message Box", 0)
    Case 1, -1
        Exit Sub
    End Select
End Sub

Answer 1

Some research suggests that this may be a bug in some MS Office applications. I'm basing this on the fact that this and this don't seem to say anything which suggests you're using the command in the wrong way, and this shows that other users have managed to get precisely this code to work.

I tested this on my Windows PC running Excel with Office 365 and have had the same issue as you - the message box is displayed, but not closed. I found a suggested workaround here, and the discussion on that page may be of some interest to you (particularly one user's description of trying to submit a bug report to Microsoft about VBA). The solution, proposed by a user called ウィンドウズスクリプトプログラマ, is to make a call through to the native user32.dll by declaring an external function - this page has some examples of how to call C dlls with VBA.The MessageBoxTimeout function is said to be undocumented by Microsoft, but you can find out a lot about it here.

The other option, which worked for me, is run a vbscript call to Shell.Popup with mshta.exe:

Function Test()

    Dim Shell
    Set Shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    Shell.Run "mshta.exe vbscript:close(CreateObject(""WScript.shell"").Popup(""Test"",3,""Message""))"

End Function

To get this to work with more complex messages, you may need to escape some characters. There is another SO question here which shows other uses for mshta's ability to execute vbscript in a shell/ console.

Finally, as was suggested by one user, you could simply create a custom user form with a doevents loop that counts down and then closes itself.