Hello,
I’m new to automator and scripting. I’ve searched the forum for scripts that might help me with my needs, but I can’t really find the right tool. I’ve been really impressed with the responses here though. I hope I’m not asking too much, or that what I need is possible with scripting and automator. Any help with any part of this task would be greatly appreciated.
I would like to use Automator for formatting hundreds of word documents that I have. I would prefer to use automator (instead of one single script), since I’m a beginner and I think first learning how to include a few scripts in automator would be more useful than trying to figure out scripting w/o automator. Unfortunately, I can’t find the formatting actions that I need within the automator program or on the internet, so I think I will need to augment the automator workflow with some scripts. I believe it is possible to integrate scripts into an automator workflow fairly easily.
I am trying to achieve several different things here:
a) get this tedious work done.
b) learn some additional actions/scripts to include in an automator workflow for word for future use.
c) learn some additional actions/scripts to include in an automator workflow for excel for future use. This seems super powerful since automator should be able to follow excels columns and rows quite well.
I have two excel tasks I am having a hard time finding a script to automate as an action. These actions are:
- Rename a file with content from an excel cell. I learned how to select a cell in excel and paste it into a text document, but not use it to rename a doc/finder ‘item’ (the included rename finder item function does not allow for this).
- Loop a workflow to repeat and execute the routine again with the next cell down in the spreadsheet. For example, it would copy the contents from B1 for the first routine and reaname a file with it, then at the end of the workflow it needs a looping action that will ask it to do the same workflow but by selecting and using the contents from cell B2.
For my excel-word routine my end goal is to:
- Copy the content of a cell,
- create a word document and rename it with the text from the cell,*
- copy text from a different word file or text file into this newly created word document,
- replace dummy text with other field content from excel (ie dummy text in word : “date” replaced with cell contents from excel “October, 18th, 2011”) (I know how to use the automator to select cells in excel, but not progressively as the workflow loops and continues down a list of cells)
- If formatting from the word document has not carried over, then reformat using above commands.
*there may be multiple ways to name or rename. It could be a rename command used here, or a save as, but the name needs to be dynamic(?) content based on the excel cell.
Word formatting actions:
For word, automator has some basic functions, but doesn’t really provide a way to set paragraph alignment, indentation, or font changes for specific text.
I would like to be able to:
Key tasks:
Set alignment to justified for the entire document
Set indentation of first paragraph
Set indentation of all other paragraphs
Replace dummy text with text from excel (seems advanced, see below)
less important tasks:
Set Bold Text to Arial 10
Set Non-Bold Text to Palatino 11
(could be one script action,?)
Any help creating a script or referencing an article that has the script for any of these would be great.
Thanks.