Hi Kevin, well, you're really asking many questions here, but I don't think you realize all of them.
first, when you start a program by using the CreateObject() or GetObject() method, it's not the same as if the started the program by choosing it from a menu choice or a shortcut or clicking on it from windows explorer. getting it running by use of CreateObject is called using COM automation, or usually just automation; it specifically means one program under the control of another. it's a topic you should go do some research on, because it's very important to your ability to write the more complex types of scripts. In this case, the next question is whether a program will stay running, when the program which opened it stops running. you will need to look this answer up in the object model documentation for each program you want to use. it turns out that Excel will not stay running, while MS Word will stay running, so there's no predicting the answer. Another question you'll see, is that with the hot key script you wrote, it could have, and probably did, keep running, even though Excel shut down right away. this is because you opened excel from within a subroutine, and assigned a variable to keep track of excel that was declared from within this subroutine. when this subroutine finished executing, which it did as soon as excel opened up, it was done, it exited, and all the variables it declared went away (called "going out of scope"). because they went away, it's equivalent to your script having stopped running, at least as far as Excel goes, so excel shuts down. excel, and many programs like it which shut down when the program that calls them shuts down, has a property that you can set which will keep it from shutting down when your program does. the documentation for this prop-erty is just below my answer. if you just set this property to true before you exit your subroutine, then excel will not shutdown. the other way of handling this is to run excel the same way a shortcut would have run it, or double clicking on it would have done. this is simply running it, and it will not be under your script's control, but it won't close down on you either. you don't do this via CreateObject, but via a method the operating system provides for launching any program; one way is to use CreateObject to create the wscript.shell object, and then use the "run" method it has. or, the homer shared library has a shellrun method which will run a program for you. You asked about Wordpad, which is the last question I see, and why you couldn't start it using createobject; it's because few program have a COM object interface, like excel does, so when you go to try and use wordpad.application, it's not there, and the operating system can't create it for you. the only way to start wordpad then is to use one of the program run methods I mentioned above in that case. you'll have to research each program you're interested in, to see if it has a com object automation interface, to know whether you can control it via createobject or not. hth, Chip --------- UserControl Property See Also Applies To Example True if the application is visible or if it was created or started by the user. False if you created or started the application programmatically by using the CreateObject or GetObject functions, and the application is hidden. Read/write Boolean. Remarks When the UserControl property is False for an object, that object is released when the last programmatic reference to the object is released. If this property is False , Microsoft Excel quits when the last object in the session is released. -----Original Message----- From: Kevin Simon Huber [mailto:kevin.hub...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 12:27 PM To: gw-scripting@gwmicro.com Subject: loading an application from within a script Hi: I have written the following code based on an article from Sesame Script dim testkey: set testkey = keyboard.registerhotkey("shift-windows-t","turnonapp") sub turnonapp set ObjExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application") ObjExcel.visible = true end sub The problem is that when I press the hotkey, Excel appears and then disappears whereas, if I just write a script containing: set ObjExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application") ObjExcel.visible = true when I run the script, Excel will appear and stay until I manually close it. Why is this happening? I also discovered that when I replaced "excel with "wordpad" in the above code, I get an error saying that the ActiveX component couldn't create the object. What do I have to do if I want to open Wordpad or any other application from within the script? Kevin Huber __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database
