How to run a .bat file within KNIME?

Dear KNIMEr's

I would like to start a .bat file (which starts a vba-macro in Excel) from KNIME. I checked the node "External Tool", however this is not quite what I'm looking for as I do not have any input data files (as required) to be provided. Is there any alternative node to run a .bat file?

Thanks a lot for any suggestions

Kind regards, Ava

You could probably do it in the java snippet node if you can't work around the files issue in the external tool node. 

You can simply feed a empty data table into external tool node.
There is a node called “empty table creator”