The Scenario
You are a revenue operations manager. A sales rep imported 500 leads from a trade show badge scan into an Excel workbook, the Leads tab. Column C has phone numbers, column D has email addresses, column F has EU bank IBANs for the enterprise accounts.
Your CRM import will reject rows with invalid emails and silently accept bad phone numbers that will bounce later. Your job is to flag every bad row before the import runs. The upload window closes at 3 PM.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- You export a sample, run it through a free email checker, look at the results
- You try to write a formula to validate phone numbers, give up after forty minutes
- You manually check three IBANs in a browser tool
- You realize you have only processed fifty rows and it is 2:30 PM
- The import runs at 3 PM with 450 unvalidated rows.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads your leads tab and calls API Ninjas validation endpoints row by row, then writes a composite flag so you can sort and fix before the import.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in the Leads tab, validate the phone number in column C and the email in column D using API Ninjas, then add a "Valid" or "Invalid" flag in column E. If either field is invalid, note which one in column F.
SheetXAI calls the API Ninjas phone and email validators for every row, combines the results, and writes the composite outcome into column E with a specific failure note in column F.
What You Get
A Leads tab with two new columns:
- Column E: Status — "Valid" if both phone and email pass, "Invalid" if either fails
- Column F: Failure reason — "Phone invalid," "Email invalid," "Both invalid," or blank
Sort by column E descending and every bad row surfaces at the top before you touch the CRM import. No guessing, no regex, no browser lookups.
Got IBANs in column F? Add one line to the prompt and SheetXAI validates those too, writing country code and bank name for valid IBANs and "INVALID" for bad ones.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Trade show exports are never clean. SheetXAI handles the mess alongside the validation.
When phone numbers have inconsistent formatting
Some have country codes, some don't, some have dashes or dots or parentheses.
Normalize all phone numbers in column C of the Leads tab to E.164 format before validating. Validate each normalized number using API Ninjas and write the result into column E.
When you also need the IBAN details
Enterprise rows in column F have EU bank IBANs. You want country and bank name for the valid ones.
Check every IBAN in column F against the API Ninjas IBAN validator. For valid IBANs, write the country code into column G and bank name into column H. For invalid ones, write "INVALID" in column G and leave H blank.
When you want to filter to valid rows only
After validation, you only want the clean rows going into the CRM.
After running phone and email validation on the Leads tab, copy only the rows where column E is "Valid" to a new tab called "CRM-Ready." Leave the original Leads tab intact.
When the full validation-and-clean run is one prompt
Raw 500-row import, inconsistent phone formats, some blank emails, IBANs in mixed formats, and the clock is running.
Normalize phone numbers in column C of the Leads tab to E.164 format. For rows where email in column D is blank, write "MISSING" in column E and skip validation. For all other rows, validate phone and email via API Ninjas and write the combined flag in column E with the failure reason in column F. Validate IBANs in column F and write country code and bank name in columns G and H. Copy all rows where column E is "Valid" to a new tab called "CRM-Ready."
The pattern: cleaning and validation in one pass so you make the 3 PM window.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with phone numbers or emails, then ask SheetXAI to validate it using API Ninjas. The API Ninjas integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to enrich a domain list with MX and WHOIS data in Excel or the API Ninjas in Excel overview.