Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript:
MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition

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April, 2007
Page 86

          set draft to false

          set first page number to 1

          set order to down then over

          set black and white to false

          set zoom to 100

     end tell

end tell

The only tiny difference of any sort is that AppleScript does not have a documented term for the xlAutomatic constant, so I've set the first page number to 1, the usual "automatic". A bit of checking has discovered that the Long constant in VBA of xlAutomatic is -4105, and that may work if you try it in AppleScript too.

There is also an equivalent version of the macro possible in the old XL 4 Macro language, faster and more efficient than either VBA or AppleScript, which is likely to still work in Office 2008. This is not the place for XL4M code but you might care to look into it if it's still going strong in Office 2008. AppleScript can run XL4M macros via the run VB macro command that can pass arguments to a macro and call it using an A1 or R1C1 range reference, a range object, or the macro's name. So it does look as if the text of the macro could be stored in a cell on a macro sheet and run from there.

Inserting a Page Break

You can set or clear page breaks using the page break property:

This will set a single page break to the left of column C and above row 10:

With ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")

   .Cells.PageBreaks – xlNone 'Clear all manual pagebreaks

   .Range("C10").PageBreak = xlPageBreakManual

End With

In AppleScript:

tell application "Microsoft Excel"

     tell sheet "Sheet1" of active workbook

          set page break of every range to page break none

          set page break of range "C10" to page break manual

     end tell

end tell

Use page break of every range – not every cell.

In VBA, you can also specify a horizontal or vertical page break by adding to the worksheet‘s HPageBreaks or VPageBreaks collection:

With ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")

   .HPageBreaks.Add Before:=.Range("C10")

End With

In AppleScript it's actually a bit simpler, since horizontal page break and vertical page break are separate classes to begin with.

      tell sheet "Sheet3" of active workbook

          make new horizontal page break at end with properties ¬

              {location:range ("C10")}

     end tell

Note: once again the insertion location at end (or at beginning) is essential, or the script errors. (The Excel AppleScript Reference gives a similar example but neglects, or doesn't know about, at end.)

You can actually specify more properties than that, if you wish: