The TakeFocusOnClick and Default properties are not behaving like I’d like them to. ActiveX command buttons (the ones you put on userforms) have these two properties. Setting TakeFocusOnClick to False (the default is True) keeps the focus on whatever control had it before the command button was clicked. Setting Default to True causes the Click event of a command button to run when the Enter key is pressed regardless of which control has the focus.

A typical use of the Default property is for an OK button on a form. I use this when I want the user to be able to dismiss the form and apply the changes by pressing Enter. A similar property, Cancel, does the same thing with the ESC key. Typically a Cancel button has its Cancel property set to True so the user can get out of the form by pressing ESC regardless of where he is in the form.

I have a ListView control on a userform. When a user double clicks on a ListItem, a different userform pops up. It seems to me that selecting a ListItem and pressing enter should give the same result as double clicking. I base that on the fact that I can press Enter in a file open dialog box and it has the same effect as double clicking. File open dialogs are just ListViews, after all. As I was pondering the file open metaphor, I thought that maybe the Open button is simply the default button and that’s why Enter would work the way it does.

That seemed like a reasonable solution, so I but a command button on the form and set its Default property to True. The user would expect to still be in the ListView when the secondary userform was dismissed, so I also set the TakeFocusOnClick property to False. It works great. I click the button, the userform appears. I dismiss the userform and I’m still in the ListView.

You’ve probably guessed the problem by now. When I press the Enter button, the useform appears as expected. But when I dismiss the userform, the command button has the focus rather than the ListView. It seems that firing the Click event via an actual mouse click respects the TakeFocusOnClick property, but firing via the Default property doesn’t.