The place to find this kind of AppleScript information would be in the scripting dictionary of the applications you are working with. In AppleWorks, fill color is a property of a cell, while in Numbers, background color is a property of a range (which could, of course, be just one cell). The process of setting a property is the same, but since the structure of the applications is significantly different, the process of specifying a cell will be rather different. (A Numbers document can have multiple sheets and each sheet can have multiple tables, while an AppleWorks spreadsheet had just a single table, for example.)

• When I am working in the cell it shows the color I chose but when I am clicked off the cell it changes back to black. In addition I cannot change the fill color of the cells. The button to change the fill color allows me to choose a color but it does not change it in the sheet. The same with the tab colors on the bottom.
• Snow Leopard’s Numbers application lets you add shading to cells. Shading the contents of a cell, row, or column is helpful when your spreadsheet contains subtotals or logical divisions. Follow these steps to shade cells, rows, or columns.

In Numbers is there a way to set a fill color to repeatedly select for random cells, such as in Excel? I am not looking for a conditional formatting. I would like to color fill any cell I choose without having to go into the cell fill option and re-select the color for each individual cell.

Basically, while you can probably do the same thing for Numbers that you did for AppleWorks, you have to use Numbers' terminology instead of AppleWorks'. That's what the AppleScript dictionaries are for

Fill In Cell With Color Mac Numbers Application

How To Color A Cell In Mac Numbers

(Wow, two dangling prepositions in one reply.)