How can I edit an Automator action for Word?

Question

I'm running Word 2008 on a Macbook Pro, Mac OS 10.5.
Word comes with a selection of Automator actions, including one to find and replace text in Word. I often want to convert standard numerals to old-style numerals, which are part of the extended glyphs set in fonts I use. Automator will allow me to set up ten find/replace actions (for the numbers 0-9) that successfully replace all the numerals with old-style numerals. But it only does it for the main body of the document, not for the footnotes. I need to be able to do it for all the footnotes.
I thought I might find a workaround by adding an AppleScript to my workflow, which would shift the focus in Word to the footnotes and rerun the find/replace actions. I mapped the menu item View/Footnotes to the keystroke command-) and inserted this AppleScript into the Automator workflow:
tell application "Microsoft Word"
tell application "Microsoft Word" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Microsoft Word"
keystroke ")" using command down
end tell
end tell
end tell
But the find/replace actions simply repeat what they'd done before, converting the numerals in the main body but not in the footnotes. I then thought that perhaps I should have an AppleScript to do the find/replace itself, once the footnotes have been selected, so I created the following (command-H accesses the find/replace dialog box in Word 2008):
tell application "Microsoft Word"
tell application "Microsoft Word" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Microsoft Word"
keystroke "H" using command down
keystroke "1"
keystroke tab
keystroke ""
end tell
end tell
end tell
The character after the fourth keystroke command is the glyph for old-style numeral 1. For some reason Word reinterprets this as the letter a. So using AppleScript I can only replace the numerals 1-9 with the letters a-i.
I'm pretty hopeless at even this very basic level of programming, but I presume that there's something in the Automator action 'Find and replace in Word' that specifically tells it not to look anywhere but the footnotes. I also presume it's possible to insert a command to tell it to operate on the footnotes (and headers and footers: everywhere!) too.
Does anyone know a way to edit an Automator action? I'm willing to experiment and fiddle with one until I find a way that works, if nobody knows the exact changes that I'd need to make, but I just don't know how to edit an Automator action in the first place. A bit of googling suggests that I could do it in XCode, and that that is bundled with my Mac, but I don't have it.
This all used to work when Office used to allow VBA (and I was using a horrible Windoze machine). Maybe someone would prefer just to find a way of creating a solution our of the old code, so here's one part of what I used (to change the number 1):
For Each aStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
With aStory.Find
.ClearFormatting
With .Replacement
.ClearFormatting
End With
.Execute FindText:="1", ReplaceWith:=ChrW(63281), _
Format:=True, MatchCase:=True, Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With
Next aStory
Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

Thanks to all three contributors for their generous help so far. Mac people are lovely.
BDAqua's suggestion wouldn't work, I think, because copying footnote text into another application and then back into Word would lose all the associations between footnote references in the body and the footnotes themselves. I wish I could do what Klaus1 says, but Word 2008 won't allow the creation of Macros any more. They've shut off support for their creation. Nice MS. red_menace's suggestion seems very plausible and I'll look into a way of mapping the old style numerals to specific keystrokes. That might do it.
Reflecting on what you all said, I looked again through Word's help menus and eventually got pointed towards this page of 'help': <http://tinyurl.com/6398l6>. This is completely impenetrable for me, though it does compare a VBA script for Word 2004 to an AppleScript. This encourages me to hope that it should be possible to translate my original VBA script (part of which I included in my first message) into AppleScript, though I don't know how to do it because I don't really understand the language in the first place (the VBA script was put together by someone else).