greeting,
i'm looking for some pointers on how to go about searching and manipulating
text in the drawing layer in excel... we use the drawing layer for diagrams
and also use the spreadsheet layer... in the drawing layer, we insert text
into objects and text boxes. an example would be a flow chart, with text in
the objects of the flow chart diagram... we need to: 1- search and replace
strings in the drawing layer; 2- copy strings from the drawing layer into
the cells in a spreadsheet...

it seems to me that we could accomplish this by a macro or alternately to
use some kind of linking. for example, one can make a cell match the
contents of another cell just by using "=" then the cell reference. it
occurred to me that there may be a way to use one of the functions like
"text()" or something then give the object name as the argument. the object
name appears in the name box in the formula bar... if a select on of the
objects in the drawing layer, "rectangle 4" appears in the name box...

i've searched some of these web sites and found little on this topic...
preferably, if it requires a macro or script, i'd hope to find an existing
macro on the web. alternately i'd need some pointers on how get enough
information to write a script to accomplish these tasks...

if this is not the best place, can someone point me to another place for help?

i have excel version 11 on osx 10.4-

thanks for any advice anyone can offer-