The Scenario
You are a VP of Marketing. The annual board deck is due in four days. Slide 12 is the email marketing performance overview — monthly open rates, click rates, and bounce rates for this year versus last year.
The data is in ActiveTrail's executive report. You need a clean dashboard in Excel with a year-over-year comparison chart, and it needs to be finished before the design team takes over the deck on Thursday.
The slow version:
- You log into ActiveTrail and find the executive report — it is in a section you rarely use
- The UI shows the current year only, no side-by-side year-over-year view
- You export this year's data — a CSV
- You find last year's report and export it separately — another CSV
- You import both into Excel, figure out how to align the months, build the comparison table
- You build a chart — it is wrong because one year has 12 rows and the other has 11 because December data was partial
- It is Thursday. The design team is waiting. You are still in the chart editor.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that pulls both years of executive report data and builds the comparison in one go — no dual exports, no manual month alignment.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for the last 12 months and write each month's sent count, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate to the This Year tab. Then pull the same report for the 12 months before that and write it to the Last Year tab. On the Comparison tab, write a side-by-side table of open rate, click rate, and bounce rate by month for both years.
SheetXAI fetches both years of executive data, writes them to separate tabs, and builds the comparison table. Add a follow-up prompt for the chart and it is done before Thursday.
What You Get
A year-over-year email performance dashboard for the board deck:
- This Year tab — 12 months of sent count, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate
- Last Year tab — same structure for the prior 12 months
- Comparison tab — side-by-side monthly view of key metrics for both years
Month alignment is handled. If one year has a partial month, SheetXAI flags it rather than letting the chart misrepresent the comparison.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Board-level dashboards need additional shaping. SheetXAI handles it in the same prompt.
When you want the comparison chart built in the same run
You do not want to build the chart yourself — you want it ready before Thursday.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for this year and last year. Write monthly open rate, click rate, and bounce rate for both years to the Comparison tab, aligned by month. Create a line chart on the Comparison tab with three lines: this year's open rate, last year's open rate, and this year's click rate. Label it "Email Performance: Year over Year."
When you want percentage change columns instead of raw numbers
The board wants to see whether metrics improved, not just the raw values.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for this year and last year. On the Comparison tab, write monthly open rate for both years, then add a Percentage Change column showing the change from last year to this year for each month. Flag months where open rate declined by more than 2 percentage points.
When you want best and worst months called out for each metric
The deck needs a "what worked" and "what did not" callout.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for this year. Identify the month with the highest open rate, the highest click rate, and the highest bounce rate. Also identify the worst month for each. Write the full 12-month table to the Dashboard tab, then add a summary block above the table calling out the best and worst month for each metric.
When you want the full board-ready dashboard — two years of data, comparison, chart, and executive summary in one prompt
The board slide needs to be ready, not a draft.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for the last 12 months and the 12 months before that. Write raw data to separate tabs. Build a comparison table on the Summary tab with monthly open rate, click rate, and bounce rate for both years, plus a percentage change column. Create a line chart showing open rate trends for both years. Write a 2-sentence executive summary in cell A1 of the Summary tab comparing this year's average open rate and click rate to last year's.
The pattern: instead of two exports and a manual comparison build, you describe the dashboard you need for the board and SheetXAI builds it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook, then ask it to pull your ActiveTrail executive performance report. The ActiveTrail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull SMS campaign performance data in Excel or the ActiveTrail in Excel overview.