The consistency of the responses may indicate what's wrong with automator: it's evidently not very useful. I have tried it for a couple of things and found it quite limited in what it can do. It doesn't do the things I need done, and I don't seem to need the things it does. When I first heard about automator, before Tiger came out, I was picturing something different. I was hoping for something that would record and save keystrokes, much like macros in MS Word. This would be useful. Or perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps usefulness exists that I have not discovered. Peter