js Functions: Expressions vs Statements

http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline/javascript-best-practices-and-examples

Functions can only be called within a trigger not across triggers, you can add functions in a separate file and call them using the best practice guidelines

Do you need to run it as a function for some reason?

If all your doing is running alert("message"); then you could just trigger that one line every time you need it to fire.

@Phil, Thanks!  I guess I'll use separate files.  I normally try to avoid this solution because I always forget to either modify the HTML or add the file to the Story package, but choices seem limited.  For the record, I can successfully invoke a function from another trigger, but the function has to be written as an expression, which is weird to me.  

@Jackson, thank you, but this is a just a stripped-down example.  Each function contains a bunch of code, and yes, it needs to run as a function because I was hoping to call it repeatedly from different places in the Storyline file.

I would expect that window.myFunction = function(){...};

then

window.myFunction();

should work. Note that each time the timeline starts, you'll be redefining the function, which is no big deal but unnecessary. You could try :

if (!window.myFunction) window.myFunction = function(){...};

Also, my preference is to namespace any global variables. What if Storyline has a global function named the same as yours...you'll overwrite it. Could do something like : window.mydomain = {}; window.mydomain.myFunction = function(){...};