A school in Texas uses VBScript to help automate some of the steps for their student-run news cast. They wrote me asking if I could help figure out how to activate a FloPrompter window using VBScript. I was certainly glad to help even though I’d barely even heard of VBScript before and had never worked with it. All I can say is, thank goodness for Google!<\/p>\n
So after a few emails back and forth with the technical guy at the school, and a lot of Google searching, we were able to come up with the right scripts. So in case you’re also inclined to do some automation using VBScript, I thought it would be good to share our findings.<\/p>\n
If FloPrompter isn’t running yet and you wish to launch it, use the WshShell.Run command like this (note that I used the default installation folder, which may be different on your computer):<\/p>\n
Set WshShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)<\/p>\n
WshShell.Run (“””C:\\Program Files\\FloSpace\\FloSpace FloPrompter 2.3\\FloSpace.FloPrompter.exe”””)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What was tricky about getting this code right was the triple quotes at the beginning and end of the file path and name. Triple quotes??? I never would’ve guessed that. Every example I’d seen online used Notepad, which has some sort of magical keyword in Microsoft windows so not only doesn’t need the entire path, but also uses a single set of quotes. Finally, I happened upon a great blog entry written by Steve Schofield<\/strong> who explains this technical arcana, plus provides a lot of additional useful information:<\/p>\n