New Balloon That Contains Picture May Not Be Displayed (178177)

SYMPTOMS

If you run a Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications macro that displays a customized Office Assistant balloon, the balloon may not appear on the screen. When this problem occurs, the value of the BalloonError property of the Assistant object is set to 4 (msoBalloonErrorBadPictureRef).

CAUSE

This problem occurs when the following conditions are true:

The Text property of the new balloon has been set to include a picture, as in the following example:
```
     With Assistant.NewBalloon
          .Text = "{<type> <location> <sizing_factor>}"
          .Show
      End With
						
```
<Type> is either bmp, wmf, or pict, <location> is the path to the picture, and <sizing_factor> is an optional value that sets the width of the picture. -and-

The <location> includes a space, as in the following example:

      .Text = "{bmp C:\Windows\My Picture.bmp}"

Specifically, the problem occurs because the space in the path causes the file location to be evaluated as "C:\Windows\My", not "C:\Windows\My Picture.bmp". If the picture cannot be found in the specified location, the balloon cannot be displayed, and the BalloonError property is set to 4.

WORKAROUND

Microsoft provides programming examples for illustration only, without warranty either expressed or implied. This includes, but is not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This article assumes that you are familiar with the programming language that is being demonstrated and with the tools that are used to create and to debug procedures. Microsoft support engineers can help explain the functionality of a particular procedure, but they will not modify these examples to provide added functionality or construct procedures to meet your specific requirements. To prevent this problem from occurring, enclose the location of the picture file in a double set of quotation marks, as in the following example:

      With Assistant.NewBalloon
       .Text = "{bmp ""C:\Windows\My Picture.bmp""}"
       .Show
   End With

When you run the macro, the balloon appears correctly, and the value of the BalloonError property is zero (0).

REFERENCES

For additional information about getting help with Visual Basic for Applications, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: