Drawing shapes to screen falling behind other code - excel

Question

I am trying to create a small tutorial for one of my Excel Applications and I am running into the issue where I'm trying to draw a text shape to the screen to give advice on what to enter into an InputBox but the InputBox gets displayed before the text shape, however, when running in debug mode and stepping through the code it all works fine.
There is one userform ufNext which only contains one button, ufNext. The click event code for this button contains a Select Case clause to determine what to do each time it is clicked. The value the clause is checking is a Public variable, tutSectionsRun
Option Explicit
Private Sub btnNext_Click()
Select Case tutSectionsRun
Case 1
Call Section2
Case 2
Call Section3
Call MPFilterString
' Case N
' ...
End Select
End Sub
The code starts in Section1 which just sets the position of ufNext and shows the form then sets the global variable tutSectionsRun to 1.
The user clicks the "Next" button on the ufNext form and it calls Section2 which re-positions the form (there would normally be other code in these "Section" procedures), and sets the global variable to 2.
Again, the user clicks the "Next" button but this time there is the issue where before the shapes are drawn to the screen, I get the InputBox popping up first and only after it closes the text shape tutText is drawn to the screen.
Option Explicit
Public tutSectionsRun As Long
Sub Section1()
ufNext.Left = 550
ufNext.Top = 450
ufNext.Show
tutSectionsRun = 1
End Sub
Sub Section2()
ufNext.Left = 910
ufNext.Top = 350
tutSectionsRun = 2
End Sub
Sub Section3()
Dim tutText As Shape
Set tutText = ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddLabel(msoTextOrientationHorizontal, 600, 300, 200, 100)
tutText.TextFrame2.TextRange.Text = "Enter the string ""gr"" into the input box."
tutText.Locked = False
ufNext.Hide
tutSectionsRun = 3
End Sub
Sub MPFilterString()
Dim s As Variant
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
s = Application.InputBox("Enter string to filter out.", "Filter String.")
If s = False Then Exit Sub
End Sub
**Edit : I forgot to mention that the userform is non-modal. Otherwise execution would pause on the call to ufNext.Show and clicking next would call the event handler before the tutSectionsRun variable had been set to 1

Answer 1

Thanks to #BrakNicku who confirmed my suspicions in the comments, saying that the InputBox was preventing the screen from being refreshed for the text shape from ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddLabel to be displayed.
Their link to this answer offered some suggestions.
What I found was that adding either of these before the InputBox was called would force the screen to refresh but only if Application.ScreenUpdating = False was removed, or at least just moved further down in the code.
- ActiveSheet.Calculate
- ActiveWindow.SmallScroll
- Application.WindowState = Application.WindowState
I always like to call Application.ScreenUpdating = False at the top of my procedures, so I went with a different approach, thinking that the problem was that the time to refresh the screen with shapes drawn was longer than the time between the instruction to do so and the instruction to draw the InputBox to screen. So, I thought a slight delay before calling the InputBox might be a better choice for me, probably not for everyone but I felt better about doing it this way. (Application.ScreenUpdating = False is a good friend of mine and I didn't want to see her go, or even be relocated) So I just made a small wait procedure.
Sub Wait(secs As Single)
Dim finishTime As Single
finishTime = Timer + secs
Do While Timer < finishTime
DoEvents
Loop
End Sub
And called it at the top of the MPFilterString procedure. It only takes about 50ms for the shapes to show on screen but I give it 100ms to be safe.
Sub MPFilterString()
Dim s As Variant
WaitFor (0.1)
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
s = Application.InputBox("Enter string to filter out.", "Filter String.")
If s = False Then Exit Sub
' more code ...
End Sub