Learning AppleScript for Beginners » Word 2004

AppleScript for PowerPoint Presentations

admin — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:10:53 +0000

This is for those of you who use PowerPoint on a daily basis. The code found in this script can be a real time saver when you have certain presentations that your organization needs to run frequently.

If you are used to doing scripting directed to ‘normal’ Apple applications, scripting PowerPoint will look a little [...]

Formatting and Editing Text Objects with Word 2008

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:08:14 +0000

While Microsoft has its own scripting language (Visual Basic for Applications or ‘VBA’) to do all (most) of the same things as presented here, it is rather clunky and difficult to use compared with the more natural syntax of AppleScript.

Here we will look at some of the most necessary scripting elements for Word 2008 [...]

Enhanced – New Doc for AppleWorks 6

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:14:19 +0000

It has become abundantly clear to me that there is still a lot of interest in AppleScripts for AppleWorks 6 and questions on implementation of scripts that my previous posts on this topic have not addressed to the satisfaction of those who use AppleWorks 6 and, since it is an application that is still [...]

Choosing a Color from the Color Picker

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:41:47 +0000

The final ‘choose’ command, ‘choose color’ will be covered here. The choose color dialog is somewhat obscure and you aren’t as likely to use it as the others, but it is worth mention. It is not complicated at all. The script below results in the color picker window, with the rainbow effect as in the [...]

Choose Application

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:39:51 +0000

The ‘choose application’ command is very similar in syntax to the ‘choose file’ command, in fact, so similar that I will not go into too much detail. As in my post on the enhancements to the list dialog, I will present a script and then explain the purpose of the parameters used as needed:

set [...]

Enhanced Choose from List (Tiger and Leopard)

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:04:25 +0000

In one of my early posts I outlined the basic syntax for the ‘Choose from List’ dialog. Here, I will present some of the new parameters that are available in Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5).

In case you need to refresh your memory, here is the basic command:

set theName to (choose from list {"John", [...]

Choose File Name Command

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:10:54 +0000

The ‘choose file name’ command is similar to the ‘choose file’ command. unlike the choose file command it returns a reference pointer to a file that does not yet exist without actually creating the file:

set theFile to choose file name with prompt "Set file name and location:"

With a result such as:file “Macintosh [...]

Choose File Dialogs

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:23:56 +0000

In this post, we continue with the ‘choose file’ command. Like the ‘choose folder’ command, it returns a reference pointer to the actual file that it represents. In this case, it returns an alias reference to a document such as:

set theFile to choose file with prompt "Select a file to open:"

With the following [...]

Choose Folder Dialogs

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:27:56 +0000

In the next few posts, we will look at dialogs where the user chooses among items in directories on the desktop that return reference pointers to the actual files (most are aliases) that they represent. The dialogs we will deal with here are ‘choose folder’, ‘choose file’, ‘choose file name’ and ‘choose color’.

First, a [...]

Creating a New Document with Microsoft Word 2004

admin — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:45:16 +0000

For those of you who prefer to use Word for your text documents, this is a fairly straightforward script to create a new document with a default font and text and save it to your hard drive:

tell application "Microsoft Word" activate try set newDoc to make new document set name of font object [...]