[Although I use it a lot at work, I don't usually post Word tips on Hawk Wings. This one, though, is too good to pass up.]

If you do a lot of cutting and pasting from one document to another in Word (2004 and 2008) and want your pasting to adopt the style of the new document, you will know what a pain in the butt it is.

Word expects you to go to the Edit menu, choose Paste Special and then select Unformatted Text in the next dialog box and click OK.

I couldn’t count the number of hours I’ve spent doing this. I came to accept it as an Office for Mac user’s fate; something that just had to be endured.

Joe Kissell, senior editor at TidBITS, has the shortcut I wish I had discovered years ago. In a TidBITS post he provides the scripts needed to reduce this convoluted process to a single keystroke.

As he points out, I could have automated this with the macro-recorder in Word 2004. Never thought of that!

But Word 2008 has lost its scripting support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and ,along with that, the ability to record macros.

Instead, in Word 2008 you will need to use AppleScript.

Joe provides the steps for setting up the macro in Word 2004 and the applescript Word 2008 users will need to get the same result.

He even unlocks the mysteries of the way a file called Paste Plain Text\smV.scpt is automatically bound to a keystroke shortcut.

Check out his article and other newsy posts and tips at TidBITS.

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Christina Laun at VirtualHosting.com has posted a killer list of 50 tips, scripts, extensions and hacks to make the most of Google’s Calendar service.

She starts off with some basic tips, keyboard shortcuts, integration with Gmail, reminders and so forth.

Things get more interesting for seasoned users with her collection of 15 (mostly Greasemonkey) scripts that offer skinning, interface streamlining and more, including the Better Gcal script, which combines several of the most useful scripts (à la Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail Firefox extension).

Finally, she provides a list of Firefox Extensions, hacks and some syncing utilities that help Outlook users and others get the most of Gcal. She doesn’t mention BusySync’s public beta that offers iCal-Gcal syncing or Spanning Sync , but I guess you knew about those already.

If you use Goolge’s Calendar, you will want to bookmark Christina’s collection of tips for sure.

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Andreas Amann has pushed out two quick updates to his Mail Scripts applescript collection.

Now at version 2.8.2, changes include a fix to make the Schedule Delivery script work in 10.4 and 10.5, a workaround to fix a possible error in the Schedule Delivery and Send all Drafts scripts caused by the way Leopard Mail fails to report the account of draft message, and a smarter Export Addresses script, which is no longer stumped if a contact has no work address.

Mail Scripts is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Andreas’ web site .

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Some time ago, while I wasn’t watching, Thomas Aylott updated his clever scripts which make iCal able to pipe its alarms through to Growl.

Previously, when Hawk Wings last blogged it, the process of activating the scripts was rather difficult and involved a lot of digging around in iCal’s guts.

Now Thomas has packaged up the scripts in a disk image along with step-by-step instructions on how to install them:

Four steps and you are done. Then you can enjoy Growl’s alerts instead of the iCal’s big scary messages with the jangly alarm clock.

The disk image is available on Thomas’s web site.

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Thursday’s tip about trimming the fat out of Mail’s Envelope Index for a leaner, faster Mail.app got a fair bit of coverage.

Two readers liked it so much that they have produced applescripts to do the job.

Sebastian Morsch has written a script that quits Mail, runs the sqlite commands and then relaunches Mail at the end of the process. You can get the script from his web site.

“pmbuko” has written another, which does the same thing (modified as suggested in the comments below by Romulo — Thanks!) :

tell application “Mail” to quit
set sizeBefore to do shell script “ls -lah ~/Library/Mail | grep -E ‘Envelope Index$’ | awk {’print $5′}”
do shell script “/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/’Envelope Index’ vacuum”
set sizeAfter to do shell script “ls -lah ~/Library/Mail | grep -E ‘Envelope Index$’ | awk {’print $5′}”
display dialog (”Mail index before: ” & sizeBefore & return & “Mail index after: ” & sizeAfter & return & return & “Enjoy the new speed!”)
tell application “Mail” to activate

It gives you some feedback on what happens:

You can grab the text of the second script above or download it in a zip file I’ve uploaded to the site.

Obviously, the law of diminishing returns is in play here. The first time you run it, the benefit is tremendous. Run it again soon after and there is not so much bloat to remove and, hence, not as great an improvement.

Still, as some have pointed out, this should be a regular maintenance routine for Mail. You can wait for the Mail Development Team to implement it or with one of these rules and iCal, you can automate it yourself.

All you need to do is create a recurring event in iCal and use the “Run script” option in the alarm feature to run the script.

So, save the script somewhere sensible — I saved mine in the ~/Library/Scripts/ Applications/Mail folder.

Create the event.

Click on the alarm field in the event’s information pane, and select “Run script”.

When prompted, navigate to the script and select it.

I’ve added an end for the event after 100 instances because my Palm really hates events with no end date. You may be luckier.

Now you can enjoy a lean Envelope Index long after you have forgotten about the tip.

[With thanks to Sebastian and pmbuko]

UPDATE: If you prefer Automator to AppleScript, Steve Weintraub has created an Automator action to do the same thing.

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Somehow mutt never dies or outlives its usefulness (see earlier Hawk Wings post, “mutt: A thing of beauty is a joy forever“).

At least, that’s the experience of the writer at dot unplanned .

Last week, he had one of those days on which Mail.app just refuses to behave:

Mail is just grinding and grinding and beachballing and gray-timering and I’m getting sick of it. Since most Mac mail apps suck, I usually end up on a primitivist kick, dusting off my old .muttrc and fixing things up a little and going in there to live.

As part of moving back in with mutt, he installed Alberto Bertogli’s X-Label scripts , which create custom headers that can store tags or metadata like MailTags or Gmail’s label feature.

Frank Barknecht likes Alberto’s scripts too. In fact, he has gone as far as adapting the X-Label script for Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” work management philosophy, and combining it with Kowey’s GTD/mutt macros to produce an elegant GTD solution with not a GUI in sight.

I take my hat off to these people. You can’t understand a word they write but, Golly, they are getting things done.

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