The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Affinity
You have an Excel workbook full of data — portfolio companies sorted by ARR, a pipeline of 80 open deals ranked by last-touch date, a flat table of 600 VCs you're monitoring for a fundraise. You need it in Affinity, or you need Affinity's data out into the workbook, without rebuilding the whole thing by hand each quarter.
Affinity is built for relationship intelligence — it tracks deals, companies, and people through customizable lists with field-level metadata. But its data model is not flat. List entries carry their own field schemas separate from the underlying entity fields, which means there's no clean "export all" button that produces a workbook-ready table.
Below are the four common ways investment teams handle this. Only the last one works without a technical co-pilot.
Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste
The default for Excel users is usually CSV export rather than copy-paste. You export a list from Affinity, open the CSV in Excel, realize the custom fields are missing or in a different format than expected, and start patching things manually.
For a 15-row list before a quick check-in, workable. For 340 portfolio companies with 12 custom fields each, you're in for an afternoon you didn't plan for.
Affinity's field structure means those CSV exports rarely land clean. You'll be renaming headers, splitting concatenated values, and hunting for the columns that didn't make it into the export at all.
Method 2: Power Automate
Affinity has API coverage, and Power Automate can connect to it. You can set a trigger on list entry creation or updates, pull the entity and field data, and write rows into your Excel workbook.
Before you go further — are you comfortable with HTTP connectors, authentication tokens, and JSON parsing in Power Automate? Do you know the difference between a list entry field and an entity field in Affinity's data model? If any of that feels unfamiliar, skip to Method 3 or 4.
Still here? The setup is substantial. You need to pick the right trigger event, resolve Affinity's field IDs before you can map them to columns, handle type conversions between Affinity's field types and Excel cell formats, and then decide what happens on updates versus creates.
It processes one row at a time. That's useful for a live feed, not for a one-shot export of your 340-company portfolio list.
You probably just need your Affinity data in a workbook. You probably have no idea how to parse a JSON body in Power Automate or why Affinity returns field values nested inside a separate object — and there's no reason you'd know that. So this goes to whoever manages your automations, and now you're waiting.
Once you need conditional logic — only companies above $1M ARR, entries touched in the last 30 days — the flow gets more complex and the waiting gets longer.
Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons
Until recently, the best option for repeatable Affinity ↔ workbook workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure field mappings, save templates, and run syncs on demand. You picked your list, you mapped your Affinity fields to columns, you saved the config, you ran it.
That was a genuine step forward from CSV exports. Configs were reusable, mappings were consistent, and the team didn't have to re-learn the export format every quarter.
But you were still responsible for every field mapping decision, every column rename, every filter condition. The tool moved the data — the thinking stayed on you. And whenever Affinity's field schema changed, your config broke until someone went back in and patched it.
This is the previous generation. It worked, but it was fragile and operator-heavy.
The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel
There is a different approach. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Affinity integration it can push to or pull from Affinity for you. No template configuration, no field ID lookups, no automation scaffolding. You describe what you want.
Example 1: Pull your full deal list with custom fields
Export every company on my Affinity pipeline list with their list entry fields and creation dates into columns A through H in this workbook
SheetXAI calls the Affinity API, retrieves the list entries with their custom field data, and writes them row by row into the workbook. The field values land in columns next to the company name — no manual field ID resolution required.
Example 2: Export a filtered view directly
Pull the entries from my Affinity 'Q2 Follow-ups' saved view into this workbook with all available field columns, one row per entry
The pattern: instead of recreating the filter logic in Excel and then running the export, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI reads the saved view's existing filters and applies them at the API layer before writing to the workbook.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you're tracking Affinity deals or portfolio companies, then ask it to pull your list. The Affinity integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.
More Affinity + Excel guides
Export Portfolio Companies From Affinity Into a Google Sheet
Pull every company from your Affinity deal list — including custom fields like ARR and stage — directly into a sheet for LP reporting and bulk analysis.
Export Open Opportunities From Affinity Into a Google Sheet
Get all active Affinity opportunities into a single sheet ranked by last-touch date, ready for partner meeting review.
Pull Rows From an Affinity Saved View Into a Google Sheet
Extract the filtered rows from any Affinity Saved View directly into a sheet without re-creating the filter logic yourself.
Inventory All Affinity Fields Into a Google Sheet
List every custom field across Affinity company and person objects — with names, types, and IDs — into a reference sheet for data engineering handoffs.
Check Affinity List Membership for Companies in a Google Sheet
For each company in your sheet, look up which Affinity lists they appear on and write the results back into a new column.
Export All Affinity Lists and Field Schemas Into a Google Sheet
Build a complete governance map of every Affinity list — names, types, IDs, and field counts — in a single sheet.
Bulk Export All Persons From Affinity Into a Google Sheet
Export every person record from Affinity with their email, company, list memberships, and custom fields into a flat spreadsheet.