The Scenario
You are a project manager. A two-month sprint just closed and the retrospective is next Friday. You want to analyze what was actually said in the comment threads on the 60 project records in your Airtable base — who said what, when, and whether blockers were surfaced early or only raised in the final week.
The comments live in Airtable, attached to individual records. You cannot analyze them there — Airtable does not let you search or aggregate comment content across 60 records at once.
The manual extraction path:
- You open the workbook where you keep the record IDs and start going through them one at a time
- For each record, you open Airtable, scroll to the comment thread, copy comments into the workbook by hand
- 60 records × average 8 comments each = 480 rows to copy manually
- By record 20 you are skipping comments you think are "not important"
- By record 40 you are copying only the last comment per record because you are tired
- The retro analysis is based on a biased sample of the comments, and you know it.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the record IDs, calls the Airtable comments API for each one, and writes every comment into the workbook as a flat log.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each record ID in column A of the Records tab, fetch all comments from my Airtable 'Projects' table and write the record name, commenter name, comment text, and timestamp into the Comments tab in columns A, B, C, and D. Sort by timestamp ascending.
SheetXAI iterates through all 60 record IDs, calls the comments API for each, and writes the flat log into the Comments tab. 480 rows, no manual copying.
What You Get
A flat comment log ready for retrospective analysis:
- One row per comment — record name, commenter, text, timestamp
- All 60 records covered — no comments skipped to save time
- Sorted by timestamp — you can see the chronology of the whole sprint in one view
- Full comment text — no truncation, no "see record" links
Now you can filter for the word "blocker," pivot by commenter to see who was most active, or sort by record name to see which projects had the most discussion.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Comment exports have their own edge cases. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When some record IDs in column A belong to archived records
Archived records return an error from the comments API. You do not want the whole run to stop because of five archived records.
For each record ID in column A of the Records tab, attempt to fetch comments from the 'Projects' table. If a record returns an error, write "archived or not found" in column B of the Comments tab and skip to the next. For all others, write the record name, commenter, comment text, and timestamp into columns A through D.
When you only want comments from the final 30 days of the sprint
The sprint ran for two months but the retrospective focuses on what happened after March 15.
For each record ID in column A of the Records tab, fetch all comments from my Airtable 'Projects' table. In the Comments tab, write only comments where the timestamp is on or after 2026-03-15. Include record name, commenter, comment text, and timestamp.
When you want a per-record summary alongside the flat log
The flat log is useful, but the retro facilitator also wants a one-row-per-record view showing total comment count and last comment date.
Fetch all comments for each record ID in column A from the Airtable 'Projects' table. Write the full flat log into the Comments tab. In the Summary tab, write one row per record showing record name, total comment count, date of first comment, and date of last comment.
When you want the comment pull plus automated theme tagging in one go
The retro facilitator wants each comment pre-tagged as "blocker," "progress update," "question," or "decision" to speed up the session.
Fetch all comments for each record ID in column A of the Records tab from the Airtable 'Projects' table. For each comment, classify it as one of: blocker, progress update, question, or decision. Write record name, commenter, comment text, timestamp, and classification into the Comments tab in columns A through E. Sort by record name then timestamp ascending.
The pattern: instead of copying 480 comments by hand across 60 records, you give SheetXAI the ID list and get back a structured dataset ready for analysis.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with Airtable record IDs in a column, then ask it to pull and flatten the comment threads. The Airtable integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to export filtered Airtable records into a workbook or the Airtable in Excel overview.