The Scenario
You are an e-commerce merchandiser. The spring seasonal refresh just landed: 4,800 SKUs updated with new prices, new images, some products discontinued, and 200 new products added. Your master catalog lives in the Products tab of an Excel workbook on SharePoint.
Algolia powers every search box on the site. Until the index is updated, customers searching for "floral midi dress" are seeing last season's prices.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- You export the Products tab as CSV
- A developer converts it to JSON because Algolia's importer does not accept CSV
- The developer is in a different time zone and responds four hours later
- You upload through the dashboard, which drops duplicate objectIDs without erroring
- Two product categories fail validation and you find out from QA, not from the importer
- The index goes live six hours late and the paid campaign is already running against stale data
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the catalog data and pushes it to Algolia directly, no export, no developer, no JSON conversion.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Delete all records from my Algolia index named 'shopify_products' then re-upload every row from the Products tab of this workbook using the SKU column as objectID. Include the title, price, category, and imageUrl fields. Report how many records were indexed when done.
SheetXAI reads the Products tab, clears the existing index, and batch-loads all 4,800 records. It writes the final count to a cell so you can verify it matches the row count.
What You Get
A fully refreshed Algolia index with:
- 4,800 records loaded — one per row from the Products tab
- SKU as objectID — so future partial updates target the right record
- Exact column mapping — title, price, category, imageUrl land in the correct Algolia fields
- Completion count — confirmed and written into the workbook
If a row is missing a required field, SheetXAI flags it before indexing, so you find out immediately rather than after a customer notices a broken result.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Seasonal catalog workbooks are rarely uniform. SheetXAI handles cleanup and indexing in the same prompt.
When category names are inconsistent across rows
Some cells say "Dresses," some say "dress," some say "DRESSES." Algolia facets are case-sensitive.
Normalize the category column in the Products tab to title case. Then delete all records from my Algolia index 'shopify_products' and re-upload every row using the SKU column as objectID.
When some rows are missing imageUrl
You want every record in Algolia but also a list of which products need images.
Upload all rows from the Products tab to my Algolia index 'shopify_products' using SKU as objectID. For any row where imageUrl is blank, still index the record but write the SKU into a new column called "Missing Image" so I have a list to send to the photo team.
When discontinued products need to be removed rather than re-uploaded
The workbook has a Status column. You want "active" rows in the index and "discontinued" rows removed.
For each row in the Products tab where Status is "active," upsert the record in my Algolia index 'shopify_products' using SKU as objectID. For each row where Status is "discontinued," delete the matching record from the index. Report counts for both operations.
When the catalog spans two tabs and you need one unified index
The Apparel tab has clothing, the Footwear tab has shoes. You want one Algolia index.
Combine all rows from the Apparel tab and the Footwear tab. Add a sourceTab field to each record indicating which tab it came from. Then delete all records from my Algolia index 'shopify_products' and re-upload the combined set using the SKU column as objectID.
The pattern: clean and index in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the conditional logic inline, so the seasonal push takes one step instead of four.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your product catalog workbook, then ask it to push the data to your Algolia index. The Algolia integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more Algolia workflows, see how to export your index for auditing in Excel or the Algolia in Excel overview.