Hi sapator, thanks for your response. I know this type of thing can be done at run-time by dynamically adding controls as you suggest. What I am looking for here is a "design time" solution - something that would generate code for the FormX.Designer.vb file, so once that file is updated, I could further manipulate the controls on the form etc. The "excel" or input file could have additional parameters for location (i.e. top and left).

Now that I am looking at a Designer.vb file from one of my projects, I suppose it would not be too difficult to write a stand-alone program that would read in an Excel (csv) file with the parameters I described, and generate code for the Designer.vb file to a text file, and from that text file copy and paste it into the real Designer.vb file in my project ...