Automatic lookup of coordinates for a list of cities

Hi,
I have a pretty long list of cities in Europe in MS Excel (information: city, state, country) and would like to add for each city the coordinates using openstreetmap. Does anybody have a good idea how I could do this in an efficient way?
Thanks a lot in advance,
ted

You can do this online using the nominatim service or offline.

For example you could get a europe.osm file, filter for place=city/town/village with osmfilter.

For getting the state/country you can evalute the is_in Tag, or search for the nearest addr: node.