Automator on unsupported apps: how to? Say I have a list of files and I want to open and process them one by one through a third party program. Does this third party program need to support Automator, in order for me to do this?

I am asking this because I just started researching Automator today, and found in it a lot of actions not only for built-in apps, but also for third-party files like Word documents, 
which made me wonder: where did those actions come from? Were they added by Office during installation? And if the developer of the program I need to use hasn't enabled Automator support, is there nothing I can do?
The application (or a third-party) has to provide support for Automator. It's not automatic.