Creating and organizing one large document from many small "forms"

Question

I'm organizing a symposium and attendees submit abstracts.
I have set up a "form" using Word to distribute to people to fill out and named all the fields, example: "Title," "Firstauthor," "Body." Etc.
They are going to email me completed forms.
I was hoping that it'd be easy to make a drag/drop Script so that I can just drag and drop these files to create big document that would organize the abstracts & attendees into a program.
Word has the "catalog" creation option in the merge-manager. But it uses some sort of tab delimiting scheme for acquiring its data when it's going to be in the form of various fields and the field-names.
At my disposal, I also have File Maker Pro, but doesn't really seem to be able to do what I want to. I don't want to manually enter information (hundreds of attendees).
Could I make a script that would:
tell FileMaker to open a database and create a new entry
tell word to get from a field "FirstName" and copy to clipboard
tell filemaker to paste from clipboard to cell "firstname" of the new entry
....etc. with the other the fields .... and so on? to create the database in file maker. and then in Word, the merge-manager has a user-friendly interface to merge data from a FileMaker database and use the create a catolog feature. Is this too convoluted?
Any suggestions on the best route? any ideas? I don't think what I'm trying to do is all that unusual.
I've never written an applescript, but I have used them and I read about the language. I am generally a quick learner .... I just need to be pointed into the best plan of attack or know what the capabilities are.
Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   OfficeX and File Maker Pro
Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Hi Ettor,
Firstly, if the document is password protected, then I don't know if it could be done. Tatro's documents probably aren't. The first step is to unprotect the fill-in form document with ui scripting:
tell application "Microsoft Word" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Microsoft Word"
tell menu bar 1
tell menu "Tools"
delay 1
click menu item "Unprotect Document"
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
The document needs to be unprotected for macros to work. from there you can run a saved macro that sets the Save Preference, Save data only for forms. I named my recorded macro "ChangeFormPref". The macro could probably save the file also, but I wanted a simple macro. To run the macro, I found this on the Internet somewhere:
do Visual Basic "Application.Run \"ChangeFormPref\""
At this point, when you save the document, it's saved as text with AppleScript. Here's the entire script with no error checking:
set dp to (path to desktop as string)
set fs to (dp & "new.txt")
tell application "Microsoft Word" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Microsoft Word"
tell menu bar 1
tell menu "Tools"
delay 1
click menu item "Unprotect Document"
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
tell application "Microsoft Word"
activate
do Visual Basic "Application.Run \"ChangeFormPref\""
delay 1
save front document in fs
end tell
The delays may not be necessary, except for the one that waits for Word to activate. Here, I just placed the new.txt file on the desktop for testing.
Next, AppleScript could easily concatenate the files creating data for a database. I would probably use the new.txt file as a temporary file, read that file, concatenate to a main file, clear the temp file, rewrite to it with Word, etc.. It might be faster though to create all the files first with some naming convention.
I wasn't sure if Tatro was coming back, but am glad someone may use it.
Note that Tatro is using Word X.
Edited: I should give a warning that if you unprotect document and protect it again you lose the data. reprotecting seems to clear the form.
gl,