Paul B,
I just downloaded and installed your Print Task Lists v. 1.0.2 and I am totally blown away by it! At minimum, I just expected I would get a nice list of my tasks printed out, but I could hardly believe me eyes when Word opened up with the gorgeously formatted document! And I can customize!
Paul, you and your scripting prowess are a tremendous treasure to the Mac community — and I’m sure that many feel the same way. The skill and craft and professionalism of your scripts and unselfish support to other users are simply amazing. I just has to say that, as one who has been greatly benefited by your many wonderful and free contributions here and at AppleScript Central.
Thanks so much!
Steve
Well, thank you, Steve. I see you're using Entourage X, which does quite a nice job itself of printing the Tasks List, unlike 2001 for which I first designed the script. But I did write it so it would work in X, and until they change the behaviour of "No Due date" tasks being at the wrong end in Entourage, I guess it still has a purpose. It's also nice how Word will do secondary and tertiary sorting. I really learned a lot about Word and VBA scripting doing that script, and came away incredibly impressed with the complexity of Word and what it can do: it's really an amazing app. i think that most of us that have it use it only to about 5% of its capabilities and would do equally well with AppleWorks. Learning what Word can really do if you give it a chance was a real eye-opener for me.
It is probably my favorite script, and you just so happened to single out the two things I'm most pleased with, which is very satisfying to me. I'll tell you why. The documentation for Word VBA explains that Word's script coding for colors (called RGB) works with other Microsoft VB products - only Excel and PowerPoint on the Mac) but NOT with AppleScript's own RGB color scripting - such as is used by Entourage. And that's all it says. It's true: the three numbers for a Word color look like "123, 111, 222", and the three colors for Entourage's colors like {12345, 45678, 54321}. I suddenly had a wild guess which worked: use square roots to convert! I've still never seen this documented anywhere. That's how I can get the same colors in Word as your categories in Entourage.
The customizing thing is what takes all the time in scripting, wondering what everybody's preferences might be, and planning for all the "what if" contingencies. The most extreme example in that script, which probably no one will ever bother with, lets you play with all the different Table formats in Word. To get it to work, I had to figure out a way for the Visual Basic part of the script to send its results (it looks at your Table customizing choices) back to the AppleScript which continues to run. That's not supposed to be possible either, but I figured out a way to do that too (writing the result to a temporary text file which it makes from within VB, which AppleScript can then read and store the info for future script runs).
So letting me know you liked these things in the script (and letting everyone else know too!) makes it all worthwhile, since I hardly use most of my own scripts myself. I enjoy solving the puzzles for its own sake, but it's very nice to know someone out there finds the scripts useful. I do try to make them "professional", so thank you for mentioning that too.
My apologies to everyone waiting for more adaptation of 2001 scripts that won't work in X. I've been tied up for 3 months now doing a new, immense project, for both X and 2001, which just seems to get bigger and bigger. I keep think of more and more "what ifs". But the end REALLY is in sight. I hope to announce it quite soon, then move on, or back, to other things.
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Paul Berkowitz
