to access sublayers you just have to chain commands (using dot notation) 

for example, to get the width of the first item in the first sublayer of the first layer

msgBox Illustrator.Application.ActiveDocument.Layers(1).Layers(1).PageItems(1).width

get a reference to text frames by index number, get the first Frame

Set iframe = idoc.TextFrames(1)

change contents

iframe.Contents = "Hello World from Excel VBA!!"

also, you could get a reference to Named text frames like this

Set iframe = idoc.TextFrames("frame2")

Hi, yes it's possible, see Lesson 4, post # 15

Got it working sorry please ignore my last post I was trying on a machine which doesn't have Adobe Illustrator installed....

Hi tyedye09wab,

I don't mean to step on Carlos' conversation with you, but in case he is busy, I thought that I would throw in a quick comment or two.

First - to answer your question -- did you have an active document "open"? If there is no document open, it can't assign the variable to a non-open document. That would involve code to create a document.

Hope this helps,

TT

Lesson 2 - Move the Hello World to the center of the page

to move our "Hello World" textFrame to the center of the page, we need to know where the center is first...one way to do it is to get the Width and the Height of the document and divide by two to get half of it...let's assign those values to our variables to get to use them later in the code.

now we need to move our text to this new position, but there's no property to get the center of our text frame...we only have top and left properties, so we use the width and height properties and divide by two like we did with the document.

once we have both the document and frame measurements, we assign them to the new frame position

the whole code looks like this, please note that Illustrator reversed the Y axis in CS5, for CS4 it will go the opposite direction.

Sub helloWorld2()
    Dim iapp As New Illustrator.Application
    Dim idoc As Illustrator.Document
    Dim iframe As Illustrator.TextFrame
    Set idoc = iapp.ActiveDocument
    Set iframe = idoc.TextFrames.Add
    docWidth = idoc.Width
    docHeight = idoc.Height
    iframe.Contents = "Hello World from Excel VBA!!"
    frameWidth = iframe.Width
    frameHeight = iframe.Height
    iframe.Top = (-docHeight / 2) + (frameHeight / 2)
    iframe.Left = (docWidth / 2) - (frameWidth / 2)
    Set iframe = Nothing
    Set idoc = Nothing
    Set iapp = Nothing
End Sub

to be continued....

Carlos- I tested this and got it to work. I'm a little familiar with VBA in Excel within Excel and that is it. That is sort of what  got me into scripting. I started messing around with JS because it was cross-platform. I understand that DIM is the same as VAR in JS and that SET adds a reference to the object. I also understand that "set object = nothing" frees up memory, correct? With that said, I know you don't want to move too fast with my 101, but I have a question.

In my last discussion about getting illustrator to read from an excel csv, I was wondering if the same thing could be done with Excel.

Could an XLSM file read a line from a CSV file in "A1" and depending on what was in the first column in the XLSM, search the CSV file and find the indexed item in the second column or third? I've done it before with standard VLookup functions and it was cumbersome and very slow, and for some reason, everytime I would save the file it would take forever although the xls file was a single sheet.

i've attacthed a sketch of what I'm talking about, because it's hard to explain and I think the sketch explains it better. Here it is, sorry if it is blurry, it looked fine before I posted:

I apologize to ask a non-Adobe question on their forum, but you are a big help and the guys I've come across on Excel forums have been very condesending. I'll eventually get to the step of saving to ADOBE PDF from Excel, but not just yet. Thanks in advance!