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Semi related: Not sure how many people have played with PowerShell/COM, but it's fun to toy with. Haven't used it for anything too useful (yet) but for example, to delete all the comments in a Word document in a couple lines:

$a = New-Object -com Word.Application

$a.visible = $false

$a.Documents.Open("{absolute path}").DeleteAllComments()

Better examples: http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/com-automation-...

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And this and VBA is why office is so irreplaceable. I wrote a report generation tool in 1999 with word 97. It picked a report definition off a file share, assembled documents from fragments on disk (up to 50 pages a pop with tables, graphs etc) and emailed them or printed them. 2000 documents an hour on a single Pentium pro 200 with 128mb of ram on NT. It took 2 days to write and was used until 2009 by 9000 users

This was just word, com and nothing else. Even the application host was an instance of word.

I doubt it could have been done with anything else then or now.

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