Open Links in Multiple cells in Multiple Web Browser Tabs

[ElectricBlue]

Hi All,

Here's the scenario....

I have an excel sheet. Column F, Rows 2-50, all have individual website links. I need to open all those website links on a web browser, consecutively, and in different tabs.

Manually: I'm clicking on link 1, then link 2, then link 3, and so on. This way they appear one after another. My purpose is to give them a quick review to see if they're useful for us or not... thus needing to look through consecutively.

How can I do this with the automator?

Also to note: it's hundreds of sites. And I generally do about 100 at a time as I have 8 GB of ram and my computer can handle opening that many tabs no problem.

Thanks,

E

 

[mcddjx]

I don't have access to excel, so I'm not exactly sure of the best way to do this. I would say you should first try to turn the spreadsheet to plain text, even if it totally messes up the formatting. If you can save it as any of:

html, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, wordml, odt, or webarchiveThen you could use shell script:

cd desktop/spreadsheetdirectory
textutil -convert txt spreadsheetname.???

You have to put in the file extension of the spreadsheet.

Anyway, if that makes an even partially readable document, you could then 'get specified finder item', 'open finder item', 'extract data from text' (select URLS), then 'display webpages.

If there are certain kinds of URLs in the spreadsheet you don't want, you could 'Filter URLs' too.

Hope this helps. I asked a question on here too, and need the help-karma.

-- one more thought - if you could just copy the desired URLs and paste them into a text file, you wouldn't need to worry about any shell script type stuff.

Let me know how it goes!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Hey Mcddjx,

Thanks a ton for your response.

I actually don't know anything about shell scripts or where I would even start with that.

...In regards to converting to text - I can easily just highlight the column, then copy and paste it into a text file...

Is there an easier way to use automator with that, if I post all the links in a text file then somehow use automator to grab and open those links concsecutively?

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,

E

P.S.I just came across this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14371285/how-to-open-multiple-tabs-from-one-html-file <-- the 2nd answer there looks useful, if only that could be converted to how a MAC would do it. Do you know how to accomplish this with a Mac?

Either way, whatever is the easiest way, I'll go for ... don't need multiple solutions, just a simple straightforward one ;-)

 

[mcddjx]

Hey,

Yeah, so long as you're happy to just paste all the links into a text file, we're nearly there. So, say you save the links as links.txt

Create a workflow:

Get specified finder items (links.txt)
Open finder items (in textedit)
Get contents of Textedit document
Extract data from text (select URLs)
Open websites

Does that make sense? Let me know how it goes.

 

[mcddjx]

Hmm, realistically, you can just copy them into a new textedit document, keep it open, and then do

Get contents of textedit document
Extract data from text (select URLs)
Open websites

The other commands are if you don't have the txt file open.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes! It worked, thank you SO MUCH! This is saving me so much time!

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Welcome to the forum both of you & thanks for helping out mcddjx