24.3. Summary

As you have seen, both iWork and Office have fairly extensive support for AppleScript-based automation, so large and often complex dictionaries are the order of the day. The applications in each suite also have their own particular approaches to supporting AppleScript (complete with plenty of quirks and bugs, just to keep things interesting), which you will need to learn your way around in order to use them effectively.

Scripting support in iWork applications is still rather new, and the design of some features can seem a bit rushed or not very well thought out. Office's scripting support is far more mature, although the Word and Excel dictionaries are based on the original VBA interfaces, so they may take a bit more getting used to than other application dictionaries.