though I secretly curse the fact that the only ubiquitous scripting language available to everyone in my organization is so klugey.

Could be worse, you could be using whatever you call the language in .bat files.

that would be batch language, and yes, you are absolutely correct, trying to script for MS Office in EDLIN would be unimaginably painful.

jumpnheadfirst

.bat ? I thought you could only write DOS commands in those, does it have other language?