[Eric]

I'm doing the following over and over again and I'd like to automate it:

1. hit "return" and wait about 5 seconds while a VBA Excel macro/script makes a graph and automatically copies that graph onto the clipboard (it's probably not really a 5 second wait, but I don't *instantly* see the new graph created that gets automatically copied to the clipboard, so I make sure to wait till I see the graph so that I know that it's really copied onto the clipboard before I go to Microsoft Word and hit "paste");
2. click on a Microsoft Word document to make it active;
3. hit "apple-V" to paste the graph into the Microsoft Word document;
4. hit "apple-S" to make sure that I don't lose the document if the computer crashes or something else goes wrong;
5. click back on the Excel document to make it active;

and now I'm back at 1, hitting "return" and waiting 5 seconds while the VBA Excel macro script does its job.

I had heard that Apple Script was good for this kind of thing, so I read some stuff about it and fiddled around a bit with the Script Editor, but I couldn't figure out how to automate this task. Does anyone know how to do this? Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Eric

[Diggory Laycock]

Sounds like you need three commands:

tell app "system events" to keypress "blah" with command down.

Which simulates keystrokes,

tell app "Word" to activate.

and

delay 5

to delay.

[Eric]

Thanks! That "System Events" thing was exactly what I was looking for. I ended up with the following script, which works perfectly:

repeat 1000 times
set CR to ASCII character of 13
tell application "System Events"
tell application "Microsoft Word" to activate
keystroke "v" using command down
keystroke "s" using command down
tell application "Microsoft Excel" to activate
keystroke CR
delay 2
end tell
end repeat