Re: Activating applet or app?
Re: Activating applet or app?
- Subject: Re: Activating applet or app?
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 22:13:55 -0700
On 4/8/02 9:48 PM, "Kai Edwards" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
FWIW, my personal preference (unless I'm merely grabbing some initial Excel
>
data) is to activate Excel - so that the user can refer to any relevant data
>
on the active sheet.
Thanks, Kai, and Shane. Yes, I came to the same conclusion. In X, the
dialogs are that tiny bit faster to appear when the applet is active, but
who notices that? The main "meat" of the script goes faster with Excel in
front. and - as you and Shane say - the worst is switching back and forth.
i think that any slowdown in native AppleScript business which you see is
related to being in an application tell block - not whether the applet is in
the front or not. The slowdown relates having to send the commands via an
app. Having activated Excel, it stays there even while a section of the
script is taken out of the tell block. This seems to be the best of both
worlds.
>
Sorry about all the 'ifs' and 'buts'.
Not at all, the same hems and haws are why I asked.
Now: I've always been lased to know a few undocumented 'secrets' about E and
Entourage's scripting. Bt Excel really takes the cake - just about the whole
thing is undocumented. Or is there anything other than that musty guide to
Excel 4 at large on the net?
I just discovered today the trick of prefixing a single quote ' to get a
date to be entered as string rather than as date format (where every user
will have a different format). Getting the Value by AS or exporting as Text
file in the UI removes the ', which isn't visible in the Worksheet either
unless you double-click the cell. And setting a blank cell by "" even though
getting the Value is 0. Is there anywhere to read up on all this stuff?
As another example, how would you ever know from the AS Dictionary what the
FieldInfo property of TextOpen wants: list of integer -- a list of tuples.
Tuples?? Reading up on the same Method in the VB Editor explains what's
going on. But there's no VB equivalent to knowing that you can set the Value
of a whole column by a list of lists of strings. That's AS -only. Someone
sometime went a great deal of trouble to implement all this, but no one
wrote it up. (What about needing "!" to make Evaluate work with a saved
macro? Jeez!) The AppleScript implementation actually seems pretty good,
once you accept the upper-case initial characters, but is it documented
anywhere?
--
Paul Berkowitz
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