Problems with Exposing Excel contents in SharePoint 2010

Question

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I have an Excel spreadsheet and I want to use it to trigger a work flow ... BUT ... I don't want to just use the creation or modification of it to trigger the work flow ... I want some data in the sheet to trigger it. 

I followed some How-To's and was able to get to the point where I set up a Site Column and associated it to a Custom Content Type (i.e.: my Excel sheet) and when someone creates a new document this is loaded with the ability to manually enter the value in the Document Properties bar that appears.  Great ... but why would I want to manually enter the value again when I have already have it in a cell below.  I thought, OK a little more work to do and I am done.

So, after some research, I learned that I have to  create a named cell range and custom field in my Excel document and then expose that to SharePoint. I was referenced to this article (http://tinyurl.com/29l98rl) and performed the steps as outlined ... and thought, "Great that was easy ... I am done !!"

Well ... that wasn't quite true.  After testing this out I soon realized that the data in the cell was not being populated into the Site Column.  So I went back and double checked it and am pretty sure that I did everything right (including making sure that the cell and column were of the same format and named the same).  After much frustration I scrolled down to the Comments section to learn that there are some issues ... and a possible solution. Long and short of it to get this to work  this blog recommend that the solution is to use a small VBA code, which reads the cell-values and puts them into the server properties. You can read about it here: http://tinyurl.com/2d7e7bb

Some of you might think ... what is wrong with that, just put the code in there and presto you have your solution.  For me this isn't really the way I'd like to go.  One of the primary reasons that I chose to use SharePoint 2010 is to make things like this easier and to get away from using custom code ... which would be yet another thing to manage.

So if any of you of know of a solution that doesn't require creating custom code I would appreciate the help.