Disclaimer
We apologize in advance for posting yet another entry which is only for those readers who are Mac using lawyers.
Have you ever used your computer to move information from one program to another? Maybe you’ve had to cut and paste a great deal of text to a word processor, or worse, had to cut and paste text from a spreadsheet to a word document. This involves reformatting the text and can be quite time consuming. Such tasks are perfect for automation with AppleScript. While Applescript may seem daunting, Larry Staton has created a blog, Scripting for Lawyers, to help attorneys learn Applescript. Larry’s first tutorial is available as a screencast and we are looking forward to many more.
TUAW.com also has a great article 
on using Automator to automate common tasks in Word 2008 for Mac. Automator comes as a standard install on a Mac and can be found in your Utilities folder within your Applications. Automator allows users to automate tasks by a drag and drop process to create “workflows” which automate repetitive tasks, all without knowing Applescript or any programming language. 
The process is done by dragging pre-made “Actions” (file renaming, finding linked images, creating a new mail message, open a document or folder, etc.), all of which act as individual steps in a Workflow document. A Workflow document then can be used to carry out repetitive tasks. A user can also save these Workflows so that it can be used over and over again, whenever it is needed and even share them with other users. A great resource for pre-made Automator scripts is Automator.us.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help you PC lawyers so we’d love to hear from readers who have a comparable solution in a Windows environment.