AppleScripting Pages & Numbers

Question

I have an issue whereby a number of colleagues have created about 280 reports in separate [but consistent] .doc files which need to be tabulated into a single spreadsheet.
Fortunately the contents of the .doc files are in uniform tables of 2 columns and 24 rows [the first column contains labels so I only need the second column]. Now I can obviously open up each file and copy then past the data into numbers but I don't want to do that as it would take a while and is asking for mistakes. Obviously my preference would be for our good friend AppleScript to do it for me.
Now I have little experience with AppleScript and as I'm against the clock a bit here I don't have luxury of trial and error, so was hoping for a little help on here. I've managed to get Pages to copy and paste the whole table into numbers ok but I'm struggling with the next step. Basically I'm after a loop which will run through all the reports, select the second column of the table and paste it into the numbers table one column after the other.
Anyone have any idea how I'd do this?
Before anyone suggests exporting as txt files and comma delimiting, or export as html using VBA etc, I've tried many of these approaches already and because of carriage returns and other formatting the table keeps getting split into the wrong number of rows.
The only app I've tried which correctly copies and pastes the data is pages and numbers.
Many thanks in advance
Antony

Answer 1

well, at any rate, if you don't have Word, this should do the job.  This is without frills (it doesn't check to make sure you have a Numbers spreadsheet open, or to see if the files you feed it are the correct Kind, or stuff like that).
set coalesceFolder to choose folder
tell application "System Events"
          set fileList to POSIX path of (files of coalesceFolder whose visible is true)
end tell
set i to 1
repeat with thisFile in fileList
          tell application "Pages"
  open thisFile
                    tell document 1
  select table 1
                    end tell
  activate
          end tell
          tell application "System Events"
                    tell process "Pages"
  keystroke "c" using command down
                    end tell
          end tell
          tell application "Numbers"
                    set insertionCell to "A" & i
                    set i to i + 24
                    tell document 1's sheet 1's table 1
                              set selection range to cell insertionCell
                    end tell
  activate
          end tell
          tell application "System Events"
                    tell process "Numbers"
  keystroke "v" using command down
                    end tell
          end tell
end repeat