Working outside Excel

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Recently rooster boy showed me how to work outside excel to speed up operation. I have used that suggestion a number of times . As I color some cells in my worksheet I have tried to use the same method to apply color, nothing I have tried has worked. So working outside Excel has improved performance by a major amount but I slow down again coloring cells. Does anyone know if it’s even possible to process formatting of cells outside of Excel itself?

I have tried passing the color index of the range the same way as rooster boy showed me how to pass the string value of a range . I also tried changing the format of a string to italic so see if I could work with the string values themselves but that did not work either.

thanks

#2

You have to work inside a tell application “Microsoft Excel” block to do things like change the color of cells or other actions specific to Excel.

Where you can work “outside of Excel” is in processing simple data. Like grabbing the string value of an entire range at once so you can loop through it in generic AS code to process the text but then have to drop into Excel to output that transformed data back into the spreadsheet. AppleScript can handle lists of pure text on its own but doesn’t know what to do with Excel cell properties outside of a tell block.