April, 2007
Page 140

                   mobile phone number, home phone number, ¬

                   assistant phone number, business address's street address, ¬

                   business address's city, business address's state, ¬

                   business address's zip, spouse, description}

          end tell

          set end of allContactProps to contactProps

     end repeat

     set numRows to count allContactProps

     set numColumns to count (item 1 of allContactProps) -- 16 here

end tell

tell application "Microsoft Excel"

     set newWkbk to make new workbook with properties ¬

          {name:"Work Contacts"}

     set lastCell to get address (get offset (range ¬

          "A1" of active sheet of newWkbk) row offset (numRows - 1) ¬

          column offset (numColumns - 1))

     set theRange to range ("$A$1:" & lastCell) ¬

          of active sheet of newWkbk

     set value of theRange to allContactProps

     autofit theRange --? could make Notes column very wide

end tell

In the first line of the Entourage section, we get the contacts. The example is for contacts with the category "Work". Note first of all the where its instead of whose – necessary for category (discussed in detail for the previous script "Copy to a Custom Field" above). Notice also that the syntax of the contains operator requires that the contained item ({category "Work"}) be of the same class – list – as the containing item (category is a list, since contacts can have multiple categories).

This is essential: if you don‘t put the list brackets { } around category "Work" you will get a very peculiar error message about "can't make category id 4 into a vector". (AppleScript lists are actually "vectors" at least since AppleScript 1.1 in 1994 or so – before that they were "linked lists". One of the AppleScript books might have something about this.)

It's easy to miss this since most of time we are dealing with lists of strings, and AppleScript will very nicely coerce a string to a single-item list if you forget the list braces. But nobody implemented this friendly coercion for Entourage objects – so remember those list braces { } for the contains operator, and its inverse operator is in – when the larger containing object is a list.

Commented out is the alternative of getting the contacts by selection instead of by category. If you use that method, make sure you check the class of the selected items (it should be contact) and maybe use an inner repeat 1 times loop as in several other scripts above, so you can skip items that are not contacts via exit repeat. (See "Send from Other Account" above.)