Accessing/Changing Keywords externally via Office 2004 mdimporter

[2mc]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel

Is there a way to access and/or change the Keywords metadata for Excel and Word (Office 2004) without opening the application? I had a programmer write a program that accesses and changes the keywords metadata (without opening the application) for Microsoft Office 2008 files, iWork files, RTF files, PDF files, and a couple of others. It works great (and it only adds 1 second to modified data - so essentially there's no change - the 1 second is so that Chronosync will see the change.)

Anyway, my programmer is now unavailable. I now have a bunch of 2004 Excel and Word files that I want to tag with some data without significantly changing the modification datestamp.

Does anyone know of an applescript or an automator or any other kind of code that would enable me to do this? Does anyone know of a coder that could take this over?

Thanks.

Matt

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Matt,

Do you know how the program works? I'm guessing (and I am totally
guessing here) that the program adds the keywords in the Spotlight
comments, which are visible via Get Info on a file. You can even do that
manually, or test it manually to see. I don't see what the Office 2004
mdimporter would have to do with it.

Even if it doesn't use the specific Spotlight comments field, it's FAR
more likely that the program uses metadata that is stored in the Finder,
not in Word/XL, so that it's a question of scripting the Finder, not
8-10 individual programs. (Is the program even written in AppleScript?)

If that's the case, then you don't need anyone with Word/XL knowledge to
update the program, and you'll be better off looking for AppleScripters
elsewhere. Try the Apple Discussions or probably Macscripter.net is best.

http://bbs.macscripter.net/

Conceivably, it may even be as simple as opening the script and adding
..doc and .xls where you see the .pages, .rtf in the script. But it's
probably not, because AppleScript is annoying that way. Have you
actually tested whether it works on Office 2004 files? Since Office
2008 can use both .doc and .docx, it doesn't really make sense to me
that your programmer set the script to only affect .docx files. (and
ditto for Excel)

 

[2mc]

Dalya,

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it.

Keywords are metadata stored *in the file itself* and not in Spotlight Comments. The mdimporter is how Spotlight sees what is in there.

To see this: open a Word doc, select the File dropdown, select Properties on that dropdown, and then type in some words separated by commas in the Keywords field and then save. Then, navigate to the file in Finder and open up Get Info. You will see that words you put in Keywords are not in Spotlight Comments, they are in a line item further down called "Keywords."

I have this already programmed for Office 2008, Pages, Numbers, RTF, PDF, and some others. The program can access and change this data without opening the program by somehow manipulating the mdimporter. I know that Office 2004 is a little less straightforward than Office 2008, and since my programmer is now unavailable, I'm trying to find out how to do this for these file types as well.

Thanks for the link. I will check it out there.

Matt

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Yep, I'm aware of Properties in Word and that the mdimporter accesses
content within the document so Spotlight can use it. But since your
goal appears to be to get the docs indexed for Spotlight, using internal
metadata just seems to be the more complicated route to your goal. Of
course, internal metadata has other benefits and uses.

Good luck.

 

[2mc]

Dalya,

Thanks for the best wishes.

My goal is stable file tagging that is consistently transportable between sync'd computers. That just isn't possible with Spotlight Comments or any other method that I know of. I'm just trying to add Office 2004 files to my portfolio of file types I can reliably tag with this method.

Thanks.

Matt