Windows PowerShell® 2.0 Bible

CHAPTER 4

Managing Microsoft Office 2010

IN THIS CHAPTER

Working with the COM objects

Scripting against Word

Scripting against Excel

Scripting against Outlook

Microsoft's suite of Office applications is utilized heavily in most organizations. It is because of this widespread usage that there is a natural tendency to want to automate tasks with the different Office applications. Scripts have a tendency to fall into two categories when working with Microsoft Office.

The first category of script types covers output and reporting. You may find that you want a script to do some processing and then create a file in one of the Office formats like a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, OneNote, or PowerPoint presentation. With a script in this category, you often want to format the data in specific ways. For example, you may want to output a set of data to Excel and then automatically generate a graph or chart from this data set.

The second type of script is based on making it easier to complete repetitive tasks. Everyone in the modern age has encountered a task where they need to go back through a document and fix something. This may or may not be a good enough reason for you to want to write a script to tackle a problem. However, if you had to fix the same problem in millions of documents, writing a script to handle the task would be essential.

Windows PowerShell enables you to create the logic that can handle your requirements regardless of the type of script you need to create. In this ...