Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about Peachpit products and services that can be purchased through this site. But some third-party options are available to help! The following sections show two different options for getting past this Automator limitation. Unfortunately, as I mentioned previously, Automator doesn't include any built-in way to perform individual file looping. This way, only one document would be opened in Word at any given time. When processing large numbers of documents, it would be ideal to process the documents through the entire workflow, one at a time. Surely it's not desirable (probably not even possible) to have 1,000 documents open in Word at once.

To do this, your workflow would need to perform the following primary tasks for each document:īecause of the way Automator passes input from action to action, the workflow would begin by opening all 1,000 documents in Word at the same time, before passing them as a whole to the next actions in the workflow.

For example, suppose you need to add security options, such as an open password, to 1,000 Microsoft Word 2008 documents. This approach can present a major problem in certain situations. When a set of files is passed to an Automator workflow as input, that set of files is passed through the workflow all at once. You even have some control over how the workflow's input is handled between loops.Īlthough a fine start, looping of this nature still possesses one major limitation: There's no way to loop through a series of files, passing them one at a time through your workflow. The Loop action offers some options for example, it can be set to loop automatically for a specified number of times or minutes, or to ask you if you want to continue looping or proceed with the remainder of the workflow. When the workflow runs and reaches the Loop action, Automator returns to the beginning of the workflow and starts again. Simply insert the Loop action, found in the Utilities category in Automator's action library, into the desired location within your workflow.

One such improvement, which was introduced with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, is the ability to create looping workflows.Ĭreating a looping workflow is relatively straightforward. Since its inception, Automator in Mac OS X has seen numerous improvements. Automator for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide

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