Looking for AppleScript / Automator Help

Question

I have a spreadsheet of 2000+ users which includes their user ID, email address and a temporary password. I need an automated way to individually e-mail each user their user ID and temporary password, along with a paragraph of login instructions. It doesn't seem too overly complex but I don't know where to start. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

All due respect to Camelot, working with Excel is not so bad, you just need to work around its limitations.  the following should work, without the need of creating a tab-delimited file:
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
  -- use the correct range for your data, obviously
          set theSpreadsheetPeople to value of range "A1:C2000" of worksheet 1 of document 1
end tell
repeat with thisPerson in theSpreadsheetPeople
          set {userid, email, pass} to items 1 thru 3 of thisPerson
          tell application "Mail"
                    set newMess to make new outgoing message at end of outgoing messages with properties {subject:"This is the Subject line", sender:"[email protected]", visible:true}
                    tell newMess
  make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:email}
                              set content to "Text string with email contents, including user id: " & userid & " and password: " & pass
                    end tell
  -- uncomment the following line to send automatically
  -- send newMess
          end tell
end repeat
test it a few times on a short list of data lines (say 4 or 5 lines) with the send command commented out, so that you can make sure that the email is being structured properly and looks the way you want it to.  Once you're satisfied, you can uncomment the send line and use visible:false in the make new outgoing message line.  that will let Mail create and send the emails invisibly.  but again, make sure the emails are being created correctly before you uncomment that send line - nothing worse then sending out a bulk message with errors in it.