'VLOOKUP' of sorts in Alfred search bar?

[mluks]

Hey guys,

 

I've got an Excel file with two columns being A. Names and B. a Unique Identifier for everyone

 

Would there be any way for Alfred to return the 'Unique Identifier' value based on the name I type in the Alfred search bar?

This would be like doing a vlookup of sorts directly within Alfred

 

Not sure whether this is even remotely possible... Thanks so much for your help!

 

Marvin

[deanishe]

It's certainly possible, but you'd have to write a workflow that can read Excel files and use a Script Filter to do the searching.

 

The first part is the potentially tricky bit, the second part is trivial.

[mluks]

Thanks @deanishe.

If anyone has any workflows to get me started then, I'd very much appreciate it  

[deanishe]

I've made a demo workflow for you (written in Python).
 
The source code in a GitHub repo and you can download the workflow file from the repo to give it a test run.
 
Hopefully, it should do what you want if you change the EXCEL_FILE variable on line 29 in search.py to point to the Excel file you want to pull data from.
 
If it needs more customisation, I encourage you to try to figure that out for yourself 
 
Here's the documentation for the Alfred-Workflow library it's based on, and here's the documentation for the xlrd library used to read the Excel file.
 
Here's some more information about working with Excel files from Python.