MsgBox and InputBox cover simple yes/no questions and one-line answers, but adding a customer genuinely needs several fields at once — a company name, a contact, a city, a status. That's what a UserForm is for: a small custom window with its own labels, text boxes, dropdowns, and buttons, built inside the VBE and controlled entirely by your code.

Creating a Form

In the VBE, right-click your project in the Project Explorer and choose Insert → UserForm. A blank design surface appears, along with a floating Toolbox of controls you can drag onto it.

Labels, TextBoxes, ComboBoxes, and Buttons

Each control you drag onto the form gets a default name like TextBox1 or CommandButton1 — functional, but meaningless once a form has six or seven controls on it. The single most important habit in this section is visible in the Properties window: rename every control immediately after adding it, using a short prefix that identifies its type (txt for TextBox, cbo for ComboBox, cmd for CommandButton, opt for OptionButton, chk for CheckBox, lst for ListBox) followed by a descriptive name. txtCompanyName reads unambiguously in code three weeks from now; TextBox1 does not.

Labels are the plain, non-interactive text captions ("Company Name:") — a user can see them but never types into or clicks them. TextBoxes are where free-form text gets typed. ComboBoxes present a dropdown of choices, which is exactly what cboCity and cboStatus are for — restricting City and Status to a known list rather than letting a user free-type "chicago", "Chicago,IL", and "CHI" for the same thing across different records.

Writing Code Behind the Form

Double-click any control on the design surface to jump straight to its code — VBA automatically creates an event procedure named ControlName_EventName, and typing code inside it means that code runs whenever that specific event happens to that specific control. A button's default event is Click:

Private Sub UserForm_Initialize()
    ' runs once, automatically, when the form is first shown
    cboCity.AddItem "Chicago"
    cboCity.AddItem "Boston"
    cboCity.AddItem "Austin"
    cboCity.AddItem "Seattle"
    cboCity.AddItem "Denver"
 
    cboStatus.AddItem "Active"
    cboStatus.AddItem "Inactive"
    cboStatus.AddItem "Prospect"
End Sub
 
Private Sub cmdCancel_Click()
    Unload Me
End Sub

UserForm_Initialize is a special event procedure that fires automatically the moment the form loads — before the user sees anything — which makes it the right place to populate ComboBoxes with .AddItem rather than typing choices into the Properties window by hand, especially once those choices might change or come from a worksheet. Unload Me inside cmdCancel_Click closes the form entirely; Me always refers to the form the code is currently running inside, so this line works unmodified no matter what you eventually rename the form itself to.

Worked Example: Saving a New Customer

This is the procedure behind the Save button — the one that actually writes a new row into tblCustomers:

Private Sub cmdSave_Click()
    Dim tbl As ListObject
    Dim newRow As ListRow
 
    Set tbl = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Customers").ListObjects("tblCustomers")
    Set newRow = tbl.ListRows.Add
 
    newRow.Range(1, 1).Value = "C" & Format(tbl.ListRows.Count + 1, "000")
    newRow.Range(1, 2).Value = txtCompanyName.Value
    newRow.Range(1, 3).Value = txtContact.Value
    newRow.Range(1, 4).Value = txtEmail.Value
    newRow.Range(1, 5).Value = cboCity.Value
    newRow.Range(1, 6).Value = cboStatus.Value
 
    MsgBox txtCompanyName.Value & " was added successfully."
    Unload Me
End Sub

Task

1. Insert a new UserForm, name it frmAddCustomer, and add three TextBoxes (txtCompanyName, txtContact, txtEmail) and two ComboBoxes (cboCity, cboStatus), each with a matching Label.
2. Add two CommandButtons, cmdSave and cmdCancel, and write the UserForm_Initialize and cmdCancel_Click procedures exactly as shown.
3. Write cmdSave_Click as shown, then add a temporary button elsewhere in the workbook with the code frmAddCustomer.Show to test opening your form.
4. Fill in the form for a fictional sixth customer and click Save — confirm a new row appears in tblCustomers with the values you entered.