The Scenario
You are a data quality manager. Your company's Algolia products index has 12,000 records. Engineering is migrating to a new index schema next quarter. Before the migration, you need to know which records are missing category or imageUrl.
Your manager wants the audit workbook on her desk by end of day Friday.
The bad version of Thursday:
- You write a script that calls Algolia's browse endpoint with cursor-based pagination
- It runs 12 API calls to get all 12,000 records and dumps a 50 MB JSON file
- You try to open it in Excel and Excel crashes on import
- You write a second script to flatten and filter the JSON first
- You import the smaller file into Excel and realize the column order is not what you need
- Friday morning you are fighting with import settings instead of doing QA
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that can browse a complete Algolia index and write the records directly into a tab, with no intermediate JSON file.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Export all records from my Algolia index 'products' into the Index Export tab of this workbook, one row per record. Flag any row missing a value in the 'category' or 'imageUrl' fields by writing "MISSING" in a column called DataQuality. Sort so flagged rows appear at the top.
SheetXAI browses the index using cursor-based pagination, writes every record into the Index Export tab, adds the DataQuality column, and sorts it with flagged rows first.
What You Get
A complete quality-flagged index export:
- 12,000 rows — one per record, no manual pagination
- DataQuality column — "MISSING" for incomplete records, blank for clean ones
- Sort order — problem rows at the top so QA starts immediately
- Full field set — all indexed fields in columns, ready for editing and re-upload
The count of flagged rows is your migration risk number. If 800 records are missing category, that is 800 schema failures on migration day one.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Index exports are complete by definition, but audits often need more than a null check.
When you need to check six fields, not just two
The new schema requires objectID, title, price, category, imageUrl, and brand to be present.
Export all records from my Algolia index 'products' into the Index Export tab. For each record, check whether all six required fields are present. Write the count of missing fields to a column called MissingCount. Highlight rows where MissingCount is greater than 0.
When you want a category-level quality summary, not a row-level list
You want to know which product categories have the worst data quality.
Export all records from my Algolia index 'products'. Count records missing imageUrl grouped by category. Write category name and missing-imageUrl count to the QA Summary tab, sorted by count descending.
When you want to find orphan records that exist in Algolia but not in the master workbook
The migration audit requires confirming Algolia has exactly the records it should.
Export all objectIDs from my Algolia index 'products' into column A of the Index IDs tab. Then compare them against objectIDs in column A of the Products tab. Write any objectID in the Algolia export that does not appear in the Products tab to column C and label it "Orphan."
When you want to fix the flagged records and re-upload in one connected flow
You have done the audit. Now you want to fill missing fields and push the corrected records back.
Look at the Index Export tab where flagged rows have "MISSING" in the DataQuality column. For rows missing category, infer a category from the title field and write it to the category column. For rows missing imageUrl, write "placeholder.png" as a default. Then re-upload all rows to my Algolia index 'products' using objectID as the key.
The pattern: export, flag, fix in the workbook, and re-upload in one connected workflow. The workbook is the working layer between the broken state and the clean state.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank workbook, then ask it to export your Algolia index and flag incomplete records. The Algolia integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to enrich Algolia records with partial updates from Excel or the Algolia in Excel overview.