Simple (?) Scripting in Excel Hurts My Head

Question

I still find trying to AppleScript in Excel a maddening experience. Perhaps someone could help me out. I’ve got a table of info about classical music, including file paths. I autofilter for a criteria -- an album title, for instance -- and want to copy the paths from column A to the clipboard or an AppleScript variable.
Seems simple enough: copy the shown values from column A. Can’t pull it off and it’s driving me nuts. I keep getting the entire column of data, or the paths I want along with 65,000 blank values. I thought I’d gotten it by writing a VBA macro (on a PC) that successfully copies the info from column A for just the filtered values. I thought I’d trigger it with an AppleScript and have AppleScript grab them from the clipboard and send them on to iTunes. But when I ran the macro on my Mac, it gives me “Compile error. Can't find project or library.”
The VBA Macro:
Sub CopyPaths()
Sheets("Classical").Activate
' DETERMINE THE LAST ROW WITH ACTUAL DATA IN IT (AS OPPOSED TO WHAT EXCEL CALLS THE LAST ROW.
Lastdatarow = ActiveSheet.Cells.SpecialCells(xlLastCell).Row
Do While Not (Range("C" & Lastdatarow).Value > 0) And Lastdatarow > 1
Lastdatarow = Lastdatarow - 1
Loop
Range("A3:A" & Lastdatarow).Select
Selection.Copy
End Sub
I have both Office 2001 and 2004 and would settle for either version and either an all AppleScript or an AppleScript / VBA solution -- though 2004 produces so many “missing value” errors that 2001 is preferable.
Thanks,
Chris

Answer 1

Hi,
I think Excel X is 2001. In this version you can use 'UsedRange' to get just the range that contains data. This will get you the data:
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
set r to UsedRange of Worksheet 1
set d to Value of r
end tell
You get a list of lists, something like this:
{{"a", 1.0, "d"}, {"b", 2.0, "e"}, {"c", 3.0, "f"}}
where each sublist is a row. To get just the data from column 1:
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
set r to UsedRange of Worksheet 1
set d to Value of Column 1 of r
end tell
the result is:
{{"a"}, {"b"}, {"c"}}
To change this to string:
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
set r to UsedRange of Worksheet 1
set d to Value of Column 1 of r
end tell
set def_tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {return}
set s to d as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to def_tid
return s
result:
"a
b
c"
To get a single list, use paragraphs:
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
set r to UsedRange of Worksheet 1
set d to Value of Column 1 of r
end tell
set def_tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {return}
set s to d as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to def_tid
return (paragraphs of s)
result:
{"a", "b", "c"}
gl,