iWork Automation

New website launched today by Otto the Automator after the release of iWork updates that improved AppleScript support considerably:

The whole point of using a productivity suite is to be, well… productive. And the more time you invest in performing repetitive or complex processes, the less productive and creative you become. The reimagined iWork is designed to eliminate the drudgery, with elements, tools, and media libraries, shared by every application in the suite. And now there’s one more thing they have in common: automation with AppleScript.

The site already has a detailed explanation of the updated AppleScript dictionaries (Pages sections, for instance) for iWork, as well as scripts. Here’s one to transform data from Numbers in a vertical bar chart on a new slide in Keynote; this one will create and email encrypted PDF files generated from a Pages template.

Apple seems to have listened to the power user community and there’s lots of AppleScript goodness in the new iWork for OS X. I’m looking forward to knowing more about new features that were added to the dictionaries, and not just the ones that have been brought back.

Check out the iWork Automation website here.