Re: How is the applescript support in Office 2004?
Re: How is the applescript support in Office 2004?
- Subject: Re: How is the applescript support in Office 2004?
- From: J Charles Ferrari <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 13:55:38 -0700
Word does not understand "end of document 1". For example, 'insert text
"This is a test" at end of document 1' will not work, while 'insert
text "This is a test" at last character of document 1' will
J Charles Ferrari, Esq.
Eng & Nishimura
1055 West 7th Street, Suite 1780
Los Angeles, CA 90017
(213) 622-2255
Fax (213) 622-5703
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On May 20, 2004, at 12:26 PM, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
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On 5/20/04 8:54 AM, "Bill" <email@hidden> wrote:
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>
>
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> In this page, there's a claim that "Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac now
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> offers outstanding AppleScript support"
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>
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> <http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/office/>
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>
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>
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> Anyone knows the applescriptability of Office 2004?
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Yes. Word, Excel and PowerPoint have now been outfitted with complete,
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enormous AppleScript dictionaries. It's possible that Word's
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dictionary is
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the largest in existence.
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Microsoft decided that they didn't have the capability of maintaining
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two
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utterly different automation object models (VBA and AppleScript). In
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essence, that's why the previous Word dictionary became unusable, as it
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tried to squish a binary application into a mode that could use the
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standard
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Text Suite designed for single-byte text editors.
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So what we've got is something that mirrors the VBA model, which is
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very
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complex. It will be like learning a new language, almost. AppleScript
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does
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_not_ get translated to VBA: AppleScript and VBA are peers which both
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use
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the deeper "OLE Automation" model: it's native AppleScript all right.
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But
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the model has so many parameters per command which in AppleScript of
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course
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does not use descriptive labels. It just runs on. What with all the
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enumerations as well (thousands of them) it makes it hard to read,
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Microsoft is planning to release a really thorough AppleScript
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Reference
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within a few months. I think most people will find that essential: it's
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really hard going without it. Those of you who are used to VBA or 'do
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Visual
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Basic' will know that you can learn how to do things using the Visual
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Basic
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editor. So, until the reference comes out, that's the way you have to
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do it
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still - the terms are almost identical.
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But you now get "proper English" lowercase words, no
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PortmanteauWordsSquishedTogether like this. And lots and lots has been
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added
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to make it behave like regular AppleScript, not VBA: plurals are lists
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(not
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collection objects), you can get and set a property of plurals, **whose
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clauses work** (but you can't get a single property of ;lists using a
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whose
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clause), all objects have a default set of properties (unlike VBA) so
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you
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can 'make new [whatever]' and only specify what you need,
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The single greatest benefit over 'do Visual Basic' is that you can now
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get a
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result in the normal way. (With do VBA you had to hope you could write
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a
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string to a text file on your computer which AppleScript could then
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read:
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this only worked for strings and numbers, not for application objects).
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The big issue is that Excel AppleScript has also been completely redone
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along these lines, with all the terms changed to lower case and the raw
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codes changed. So no scripts for Excel X or earlier will work in 2004.
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On
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the other hand, there's a lot more you can do, and it's faster. It also
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makes more sense. (Since 'row' is a subclass of 'range', getting the
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value
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of a row is now a list of list, like all other ranges. That's a great
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implementation that still works - faster.) I would advise you to save
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a copy
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of your Excel scripts in Excel X or 2001 as text, then open that in
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2004 so
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you can read it. The changes to the new terms will be easy that way If
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you
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don't save as text, you'll see only unrecognizable deprecated raw
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codes when
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you open the script in 2004.)
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There's so much in there, I don't know what more to say. It's very
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object
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oriented, and the closest description I can give is that it's going to
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be as
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difficult to learn as AppleScript Studio is. You have to remember that
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Word
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is not a text editor: instead of setting the content of a document or
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paragraph, you'll be wanting to
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set content of text object of theDocument to "New text".
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You have to get used to that one. And the object model for paragraph
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differs
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greatly form that of word, sentence, etc. But then again, 'paragraph'
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now
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has about a thousand ways of modifying style, format, font, color,
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size,
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etc. etc. It's complicated, and not for the fainthearted. It's a shame
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there's not an "easy" way to do these things. But they're all doable.
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Word
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now becomes an app that professionals can script reliably, and others
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can
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probably learn a few tricks to use effectively.
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There are probably a fair number of bugs lurking about. Hardly anyone
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except
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Microsoft testers were able to venture in without the reference. (OK,
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I did
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some testing too.) Please report them to MS and/or here and I'll pass
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them
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on. They're committed to fixing any bugs and getting this to work well.
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Take a look at the three dictionaries for Word, Excel and PowerPoint,
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and to
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try to imagine how much work this involved. I can't begin to estimate
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it
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myself.
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Enough for now.
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--
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Paul Berkowitz
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