Automator, spotlight comments and an excel database

[harumph]

Anyone know how to achieve the following:

-I have many, many files, each with a unique name.
-I have an excel spreadsheet with all filenames listed in column A, and a description of each file in column B.
-I want to automate a process where the description of a given file is copied into the spotlight comments box for that file.

I've been trying to create a workflow in automator to achieve this, but haven't been able to pull it off.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[Kaveman]

Not something that Automator will do.
Try AppleScript.

 

[MacHovis]

Is Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) available in the version of Excel that you?

If so, then you might want to write some VBA to iterate through your spreadsheet to generate a shell script to apply the associated comment to each file. That is, use VBA to produce a file containing lines like…

xattr -w com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment "coment" filename

where comment and filename are the values from column B and A of your spreadsheet respectively.

Then in a Terminal window use chmod+x on the generated file before executing it.