Using Classes

[James_B]

Dear All. I've been using VBA (which is my first encounter with programming of any kind) for 9 months or so. So I'm fairly new to all this.

I'm currently putting together a spreadsheet-based application that makes extensive use of balloons. I never want multiple balloons to be open. So I've declared the balloon as a public object. I've then used various different routines to pop-up various different kinds of balloons. They're all of the basic form:

Public opBal as balloon
Sub PopUp(nIndex as long, in order to specify the text that should appear in the balloon)
   Set opBal = nothing
   Set opBal = New Balloon
   Assistant.On = True
   Assistant.Visible = True
   Assistant....
   '...etc, etc...
   '(it seems necessary to specify these assistant settings each
   'time I popup a balloon since, for some reason, my settings don't
   'get remembered: perhaps the network I'm on automatically
   'disables them or something, I don't know...
   with opBal
      .Heading(1) = ...text based on nIndex
      .Text(1) = etc, etc
      '...etc,
      .close
      '....
   end with   
end sub

From what little I can understand of such things, it seems to me that using classes should be able to make all this a bit neater and mean I don't need to repeat all the same set-up and close instructions at the tops and tails of my routines. Could someone give me some pointers please?