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

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April, 2007
Page 39

But there's another issue: this macro does not actually work on the Mac (at least not in Word 2004). Things like this will happen from time to time when you get macros from people using Word Windows, so let's try to deal with that too. It seems that on Word Windows, you can work around the fact that ^p – a special character combination that means "paragraph mark" – is not, for some reason, allowed in the Find box when you also use wildcards. (We want to use wildcards to represent {2,}, a wildcard meaning "two or more occurrences" of the paragraph mark.)

On Word Windows, you simply use ^13 instead of ^p in the Find box, with Use Wildcards, in the expression ^13{2,}. But that doesn't work in Word 2004, neither in the UI nor in VBA, nor in AppleScript. Try it in the Find box in the UI and you will see for yourself. You can use ^13 without wildcards, but not ^13{2,} with wildcards (an error message "The Find What box contains an expression which is not valid" appears). In a script, you just get an error message that the "find does not understand the execute find message", which is actually the same error. Apparently, on the Mac, ^13 just means the same as ^p and is subject to the same constraints. Whether this is a bug or is somehow unavoidable is unknown.

Our workaround will simply be to look for two paragraph marks together ^p^p and repeat the Replace All a few times until there are no more double-paragraph marks. Doing a Find and Replace is still so much faster than looping through all the paragraphs that this is a reasonable workaround. Here are the VBA macro and its modified AppleScript version:

'Note that using Find and Replace is dramatically faster

'than cycling through the Paragraphs collection

'Replace: ^13{2,} with ^p, which replaces all occurrences

'of two or more consecutive paragraph marks with one paragraph mark

With ActiveDocument.Range.Find

.Text = "^13{2,}"

.Replacement.Text = "^p"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = False

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchWildcards = True

.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

End With

'However, you can't use Find & Replace to delete the first or last 'paragraph in the document, if they are empty. To delete them:

Dim MyRange As Range

Set MyRange = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(1).Range

If MyRange.Text = vbCr Then MyRange.Delete

Set MyRange = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.Last.Range

If MyRange.Text = vbCr Then MyRange.Delete

Note that when replacing, you need the special ^p character to insert a proper paragraph end (^13 would insert some sort of corrupt version, though it looks all right at first glance. It might be just a carriage return without all the extra info that is stored in a Word paragraph mark.) Here is the modified AppleScript version, with comments below:

tell application "Microsoft Word"

     -- replace ^p^p with ^p to replace all occurrences of two

     -- consecutive paragraph marks with one paragraph mark

     -- repeat until done

     repeat

          set textObject to (text object of active document) -- redo each time

          if (content of textObject) does not contain (return & return) then

              exit repeat -- done

          end if

          set findObject to (find object of textObject)

          -- we need a separate execute find on it, so best set a