Get-ADUser can't find all users - excel

Question

I'm reading in a list of users from a Excel spreadsheet one row at a time. Once I get that I'm attempting to get the user object in Active Directory that matches the username I pulled from the Excel file. Unfortunately, it gets the first user but then every user after that it says that it can't find them. Here's what I'm doing:
do
{
# Get the user's login name
$userPrincipalName = $objWorksheet.Cells.Item($intRow, 1).Value()
# Get the user description
$description = $objWorksheet.Cells.Item($intRow, 2).Value()
$intRow++
$user = Get-ADUser -Filter "userPrincipalName -eq '$userPrincipalName'" -Properties Description
if ($user)
{
if (!($user.Description))
{
$user | Set-ADUser -Description $description
Write-Host "User" $userPrincipalName "was altered."
$num_of_users_altered++
}
else
{
Write-Host "User" $userPrincipalName "already has a description."
}
}
else
{
Write-Host "User" $userPrincipalName "was not found."
$num_of_users_not_altered++
}
}
while ($objWorksheet.Cells.Item($intRow, 1).Value() -ne $null)
Now the first user (the one that is found) is in a different OU from the others. I've tried removing that user from the spreadsheet to see if the issue with them being in different OU's but it just didn't find any of them. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your loop looks like it should work.
Are you sure that you have UPNs (user1#mydomain.com) for all users, and not samAccountName (user1)?
Do you get any results if you manually run Get-ADUser -Filter "userPrincipalName -eq '$userPrincipalName'" -Properties Description (replace $userPrincipalName with one of the values you get in a "not found"-message?
What happends if you use this ($userPrincipalName = $objWorksheet.Cells.Item($intRow, 1).Value().Trim())?
Does it make a difference if convert your file to CSV? Personally, I would always recommend using a CSV-file with PowerShell. CSV-files are alot easier to work with.
sample:
Import-CSV -Path "c:\mycsvfile.csv" | ForEach-Object {
#Modify to match your column names
$upn = $_.userPrincipalName.Trim()
$desc = $_.description.Trim()
$user = Get-ADUser -Filter "userPrincipalName -eq '$upn'" -Properties Description
if ($user)
{
if (!($user.Description))
{
$user | Set-ADUser -Description $desc
Write-Host "User" $upn "was altered."
$num_of_users_altered++
}
else
{
Write-Host "User" $upn "already has a description."
}
}
else
{
Write-Host "User" $upn "was not found."
$num_of_users_not_altered++
}
}