The Scenario
A compliance request came in from the legal team on Thursday afternoon: a set of promotional posts from a campaign that ran last quarter need to come down. Everywhere. All connected platforms. By end of business Friday.
You have an Excel workbook with 30 Ayrshare post IDs — a table called PostsToDelete, column A. You know Ayrshare can delete posts via API. What you don't have is any automated way to loop through that list and execute the deletions, and you don't have time to go into the Ayrshare interface and find each post manually.
The bad version:
- Copy the first post ID from the workbook, open Ayrshare, navigate to the post history, search for that ID, find the post, click delete, confirm. That's one. Now do it 29 more times.
- By post 15, you've made a mistake — deleted the wrong post, or skipped one because two IDs looked similar when you were going fast.
- Write "done" next to each row in the workbook manually as you go, which means if something interrupts you in the middle, you have no reliable way to know where you stopped.
The legal team is waiting. Thirty posts is too many to do by hand without errors, and too few to justify building an automation for. You need this done cleanly, with a record of what happened for each post ID.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the PostsToDelete table, calls the Ayrshare delete endpoint for each post ID, and writes the result directly back into column B — so you have a row-by-row record of what happened.
Here is the prompt for this task:
Read the Excel table 'PostsToDelete' — column A has Ayrshare post IDs. Delete each post via Ayrshare and write the result status into column B.
What You Get
- Each row processed in sequence — no posts skipped
- Column B updated with "deleted" for successful deletions and the full error message for any that failed (post not found, already deleted, permission error)
- The workbook becomes your audit trail — you can hand it to legal as documentation of what was removed and when
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some rows in the table are blank or have header text mixed in
If the PostsToDelete table has a header row that got included, or some rows are empty because the list was assembled by hand:
Read the Excel table 'PostsToDelete', skip any blank cells in column A, delete the Ayrshare post for each valid ID, and write 'deleted' or the error message into column B for each processed row.
The post IDs include platform-specific prefixes that need to be stripped
If column A has values like "tw_1234567890" or "ig_9876543210" where the prefix denotes the platform and only the numeric part is the Ayrshare post ID:
In the 'PostsToDelete' table, each cell in column A contains a platform prefix followed by an underscore and then the Ayrshare post ID. Strip the prefix for each row, delete the Ayrshare post using just the numeric ID, and write the deletion result into column B.
You want to preview the list before deleting
If you want to confirm what you're about to delete before the deletions actually run — especially useful when the list was assembled by someone else:
Look up each Ayrshare post ID in the 'PostsToDelete' table column A and write the post text and platform into columns C and D without deleting anything yet, so I can review before proceeding.
Full cleanup: deduplicate, delete, and summarize for legal
If the list was assembled from multiple sources and may have duplicate IDs — deleting a post twice returns an error, which could pollute your audit documentation:
Deduplicate column A of the 'PostsToDelete' table by removing any repeated post IDs, delete each unique Ayrshare post, write 'deleted' or the error message into column B for each unique ID, and write a summary into cell D1 showing how many deletions succeeded and how many failed.
One prompt handles the deduplication, the deletions, and the summary count — so the document you hand to legal is clean.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a table of Ayrshare post IDs — even if it's 30 rows or 300 — then ask it to delete them and log the results back into the table. Also see: Export Failed Ayrshare Posts Into an Excel Workbook for Audit and the Ayrshare integration overview for Excel.