The Scenario
You are a BDR manager. Your company sent a team to a conference, and they came back with a badge-scan export: 150 contacts, first name, last name, email, company, and title in columns A through E of the Contacts tab in an Excel workbook. None of them are in Apollo yet. You need all 150 created as Apollo contacts before you can assign them to the post-conference sequence, which goes live Monday.
It is Friday at 4 PM.
The slow version of Friday afternoon:
- You export the workbook to CSV and import it into Apollo's contact upload tool
- The column mapping screen requires manual field assignment — Apollo does not detect your headers automatically
- Apollo flags 23 rows as duplicates and gives you a separate error report to download
- You reconcile the errors in the workbook, re-export, re-import the cleaned version
- You realize the newly created contact IDs are not anywhere in your workbook
- Monday arrives. The sequence is not live. Your VP asks why.
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 contact rows, creates each one in Apollo, and writes the resulting contact ID or status back into the workbook so you know exactly what happened.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create all 150 contacts in Apollo from the Contacts tab — use column A for first name, column B for last name, column C for email, column D for company, and column E for title. Skip rows where column C is blank. Write the newly created Apollo contact ID into column F for each row, or write "Duplicate" if Apollo already has a contact with that email.
SheetXAI reads the workbook, sends the create requests to Apollo, and writes either the new contact ID or a duplicate flag back to column F. You know the status of every row before the weekend is over.
What You Get
A fully processed workbook with:
- Columns A–E — original contact data, unchanged
- Column F — Apollo contact ID for each newly created contact, or "Duplicate" for existing records
Row-level status means you have an exact count. Filter column F on "Duplicate" to decide whether to update those records or skip them.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Conference badge exports are almost never clean. SheetXAI handles data quality and record creation in the same prompt.
When titles are inconsistently formatted
Some titles say "VP, Sales," some say "VP of Sales," some say "VP-Sales."
Normalize the title values in column E of the Contacts tab to a consistent format: remove commas, replace hyphens with spaces, and standardize "VP of" over "VP," variants. Then create all contacts in Apollo using columns A through E and write contact IDs into column F.
When some rows are missing company name
A handful of attendees did not scan their badge fully and column D is blank for those rows.
Before creating contacts, check column D of the Contacts tab for any blank values. For those rows, look up the company from the email domain in column C using Apollo's organization lookup and fill in the company name. Then create all contacts using the completed data and write IDs into column F.
When you want to link contacts to their account domain in Apollo
Each contact should be linked to the right Apollo account record by domain, not just by company name string.
Create all 150 contacts in Apollo using columns A through E of the Contacts tab. For each contact, link them to the Apollo account whose domain matches the email domain in column C. If no matching account exists, create the account first. Write the contact ID into column F and the account ID into column G.
When the list needs deduplication, normalization, and creation in one pass
The export from the badge scanner has duplicates, blank email rows, and mixed-case names.
Deduplicate the Contacts tab rows by email address in column C, keeping the first occurrence. Remove rows where column C is blank. Normalize first and last names in columns A and B to title case. Then create all remaining contacts in Apollo using columns A through E and write the contact ID or "Duplicate" into column F.
The pattern: clean the list and create the records in one prompt. Column F is the full audit trail.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with net-new contacts, then ask it to create them in Apollo. The Apollo integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-enrich a contact list with Apollo data or the Apollo in Excel overview.