The Scenario
Marketing attribution got re-analyzed last week. Sixty applications labeled "Inbound - Website" should have been "Outbound - LinkedIn Campaign." Your recruiter updated the source mapping in the tracking workbook — column A has Ashby application IDs, column B has the correct custom field slug, column C has the new value. She needs those custom fields updated in Ashby before the sourcing report runs Friday.
The bad version:
- Open Ashby, search for the first application ID, navigate to the application detail, scroll to the custom fields section, find the "Sourcing Channel" field, click "Edit," type the new value, save.
- Go back to the workbook. Find the next application ID. Search for it in Ashby.
- At row 20 you mistype a value and do not notice. The report runs Friday with a typo that splits the channel into two rows in the pivot.
Sixty applications at four minutes each is four hours of work that introduces errors at scale.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the mapping and updates the Ashby custom fields through a built-in integration, one row at a time.
Read the CustomFieldUpdates table — column A is the Ashby candidate ID, column B is the custom field slug, column C is the value. Set all custom field values in Ashby and write 'Done' into column D.
SheetXAI works through all 60 rows and writes a result to column D for each one — "Done" for success, the error text for anything that fails.
What You Get
- Column D shows "Done" for every successfully updated application.
- Rows that fail — wrong application ID, invalid custom field slug, type mismatch — show the exact error.
- The values in Ashby match the workbook exactly — no typos from manual entry.
- The sourcing report runs clean on Friday.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The custom field slug in column B uses the display name, not the API slug
For each row in the CustomFieldUpdates table, look up the Ashby custom field whose display name matches column B and use its slug to set the value in column C on the application in column A. Write "Done" or error into column D.
Some rows apply to candidates, others to applications
For each row in the CustomFieldUpdates table, check column D. If it says "candidate", set the custom field on the Ashby candidate in column A. If it says "application", set it on the application. Write "Done" or error into column E.
Values in column C must match a fixed option set
Before updating, validate that the value in column C is one of the allowed options for the custom field in column B. If not, write "Invalid option" in column D and skip. For valid rows, update the Ashby record and write "Done" into column D.
Normalize values, validate field slugs, and apply all updates in one pass
Trim whitespace from all values in column C of the CustomFieldUpdates table. For each row, confirm the custom field slug in column B exists in Ashby. If it does not, write "Field not found" in column D and skip. For valid rows, set the custom field to the trimmed value and write "Done" into column D.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook tracking Ashby field corrections or re-attribution updates, then ask it to apply all the changes in one pass. See also the spoke on building a sourcing channel attribution report, or return to the Ashby overview.