Peachpit Blog Post > Creating a Microsoft Excel 2008 Automator Workflow

04.30.08 - Creating a Microsoft Excel 2008 Automator Workflow.

Today’s Office 2008 Automator workflow is for Excel. This workflow will retrieve a list of selected tracks in iTunes. It will then create a formatted and sorted list of the names of those tracks in a new Excel workbook and save that workbook in HTML format. You could then incorporate the HTML into your Web site to display a list of your favorite iTunes tracks. [Read more at Peachpit.com...]

Peachpit Blog Post > Creating a Microsoft Entourage 2008 Automator Workflow

04.29.08 - Creating a Microsoft Entourage 2008 Automator Workflow.

This week, I’ll be providing some examples of workflows built with Office 2008’s new Automator actions. Today, I’ll focus on Entourage. The following workflow will create a video greeting, using QuickTime Pro (NOTE: this won’t work with the basic QuickTime Player), and attach it to an outgoing Entourage message, which you can then address and send. [Read more at Peachpit.com...]

Peachpit Blog Post > Getting to know Microsoft Office 2008’s Automator support

04.28.08 - Getting to know Microsoft Office 2008's Automator support.

Mac users are probably aware that Microsoft released a new version of Office back in January. The new Office 2008 includes loads of new features and options, including more than 90 Automator actions (which I actually developed under contract) for Entourage, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. Using these actions, you can now integrate your Office applications together—as well as other applications such as iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, and Safari—to create simple automated workflows. Throughout this week, I will be discussing the Office 2008 Automator actions and giving you some examples of things that can be done with them. [Read more at Peachpit.com...]

Macworld 2008 Presentation > Office 2008 and Automator

Macworld 2008 - A Day at the Office Series
Office 2008 and Automator: Creating Office workflows with Automator
[Watch now...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > Introduction to Scripting Microsoft Entourage

May, 2007 - Introduction to Scripting Microsoft Entourage.

For some time now, we have been discussing scripting the Microsoft Office applications, partially in preparation for the forthcoming release of Office 2008, in which Microsoft has announced that Visual Basic macros will no longer be supported. So far, we have explored the AppleScript support in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, three applications that currently (in Office 2004) include Visual Basic macro support. This month, we are going to discuss the fourth major Office application, Entourage, a popular email and project management client. [Read more at MacTech.com...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > Introduction to Scripting Microsoft PowerPoint

March, 2007 - Introduction to Scripting Microsoft PowerPoint.

In recent months, we have been discussing ways to automate the Office applications using AppleScript. We have discussed Word and Excel scripting, and this month, we are going to focus on scripting PowerPoint. [Read more at MacTech.com...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > Introduction to Scripting Microsoft Word

January, 2007 - Introduction to Scripting Microsoft Word.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the Macintosh community about Microsoft, and the forthcoming Office 12. One of Microsoft's big announcements is that they will be doing away with support for creating and running Visual Basic macros in the next version of Office. This leaves many people wondering how they will go about automating their Office applications. AppleScript to the rescue. I'm pleased to say that Entourage, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word are all AppleScriptable.

Office has supported AppleScript for some time now, and with the release of Office 11 in 2004, Microsoft actually completely re-implemented much of their AppleScript support, and also added AppleScript support for PowerPoint. Due to these changes, much of the AppleScript terminology in Word and Excel changed from previous versions. If you are currently using Office AppleScripts with a pre-2004 version of Office, then please be aware that you will probably need to make some modifications to your scripts when you decide to upgrade your Office suite. Of course, this should go without saying when upgrading any scriptable application. Any time any application is updated, AppleScript terminology changes may be introduced. This is why it is always a good idea to test your existing scripts with any new application version before implementing it into your live workflow.

This month, we're going to take a look at scripting Microsoft Word. We'll walk through some basic techniques for interacting with Word documents, and the content within those documents. Please note that all code in this month's column was written for and tested with Office 11 (2004). Therefore, if you're using a different version of Office, please be aware that the terminology you need to use may differ from that which I have used.

[Read more at MacTech.com...]