On May 4, 2007, at 12:38 AM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:

> It really should have been done instead of VBA in the first place,  
> but probably some corporate people demanded VBA on the Mac side and  
> so AS got short shrift. Now that is finally being rectified, and we  
> are getting a Microsoft app that really *is* designed with the Mac  
> as focus, not Windows.

Actually, it was done that way in the first place.  Excel was  
scriptable (using Frontier) before AppleScript was released and was  
scriptable without change when AS came out.  There were some rough  
edges--the most annoying being that the identifier 'text' (or maybe  
'TEXT'--it's been a long time--was "stolen" by AppleScript for its  
own (and higher, IMHO) purpose.  In Excel at that time, that property  
of a cell was the as-formatted contents of the cell.  I worked around  
it by installing a modified 'aete' resource into my copy of Excel,  
giving that property another name.  (I never released the modified  
'aete' for copyright reasons--I did describe it (on this very list).

   --John