In "Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance" (2008-01-19) I described a particular problem I'd been having with Word 2008 and how I solved it using a short AppleScript, now that Office 2008 no longer supports VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripting. At the end of the article, I asked for feedback about tasks readers had previously solved using VBA and were hoping to replicate using AppleScript. Numerous people wrote in with suggestions, and I describe some of the resulting scripts in an article for Macworld titled "Automating Word with AppleScript." Due to space limitations, Macworld decided to spin off a few of the scripts into their own article ("Automating Word 2008 - Additional AppleScripts"), which appears only online.

If you've had trouble getting Word 2008 to perform some basic tasks, perhaps these scripts will solve your problems, or at least give you some hints as you develop your own AppleScript solutions.