An interesting question—that motivated me to try something. I have a worksheet with Top 100 lists for the years 1970 to 1979. I want to create a playlist of the songs in my collection that are on those lists. They're from some external source, so it's just Artist, Song, Year and Rank. Without a full pathname, I can't import that to my library. I can, however, export my library to CSV, import that to Excel, and merge it with the Top 100 worksheet. So I did that, first colouring the Top 100 items so they would stand out, and then sorting the whole thing by Artist - Song. I then used a simple 'this name = previous name' formula to tag matches. That got most of them, but the most time consuming part was scanning the list for cases where the formula failed due to naming inconsistencies.
Having identified the matches, I saved just the filenames of those to another sheet. Now all I needed to do was add a column to set a flag (e.g., [Flag]="70hit") and import that to MC. But here's a snag—AFAICT, despite now exporting to CSV, it seems MC can't import from CSV or XLS. (I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.) My solution is a little less than intuitive, but
Track Year Lookup to the rescue! It's purpose has nothing to do with the task at hand, but it happens to import text playlists exported from MC (i.e., CSV files) and exports its results as MPL—so they can be imported back into MC. So, I just used Track Year Lookup to convert the CSV to MPL.
When the MPL is imported, it sets my [Flag] field to "70hit" and I use that to select the files in MC and send them to a "Hits of the 70's" playlist. Done.
