Problem: Control Toolbox Control resizes when clicked

Hi all,

I have placed checkboxes and option buttons onto an Excel 2003 workbook from
the the Control Toolbox. When out of design mode and giving one of thse
controls focus (i.e. clicking) it dynamicly resizes. The more it is clicked
the smaller it becomes. Thus far there is no code behind these controls. I
have played with all the properties and object format directives (i.e. move
and resize with cell, move only, etc) to no avail. I;ve also tried forcing
the height/font properties when the control recieves the focus via VBA with
no effect. I've searched but can't seem to find this problem documented
elsewhere. has anyone seen this before? How do I resolve this problem?

Thanks in advance

You bet. The controls on the Control toolbar are ActiveX controls which, as
you've found, are prone to unexpected behaviours when used on worksheet
objects. I last experienced expected 'growth' in these controls (particularly
the List Box) in Excel 97. I found it was triggered when changing the
worksheet zoom level (I had code which detected the users screen resolution
and adjusted each sheets zoom level accordingly).

Unless you have a specific requirement to use ActiveX controls (such as
triggering multiple events) you might want to use the controls on the Forms
toolbar instead.

These are native Excel controls which have been around since at least Excel 5.
While they each only have one event (OnClick) you can achieve some fairly
sophisticated results without VBA code by linking the controls to ranges.