The Scenario
You are a global expansion strategist at a manufacturing company. The board wants a workforce-availability analysis for 30 target countries at the next quarterly review in three weeks.
The metric: projected population aged 20 to 64 in 2025, 2030, and 2035, from an authoritative source. The Census International Database covers 227 countries with projections through 2100. Your workbook has the 30 country names in column A and nothing else.
The bad version:
- You go to the Census IDB interface and find it allows one country at a time in the browser table builder
- You run 30 separate queries, download 30 CSV files, and open them across tabs in your workbook
- You paste the 2025, 2030, and 2035 columns and realize "Korea, South" in the Census file does not match "South Korea" in your list
- You spend an afternoon normalizing country names before you can sort the ranking
- You have raw data with no analysis written, and the board deck is in 10 days.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that knows the Census IDB, its country codes, and its projection vintages.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each country in my Country column, pull Census IDB total population projections for 2025, 2030, and 2035 and write them as three separate columns in my workbook.
SheetXAI identifies the IDB endpoint, matches your country names to Census country codes, and writes the projections into three new columns. Countries that do not match are flagged, not silently blank.
What You Get
A clean projection table, 30 rows filled:
- 2025 projection column — total population aged 20–64 per country
- 2030 projection column — same
- 2035 projection column — same
These are the Census Bureau's official mid-year population projections, the same source used in UN demographic reports. Your board can cite the source in the footnotes.
Want a workforce-growth-rate column? Ask SheetXAI to compute the percentage change from 2025 to 2035 and rank the 30 countries. It does it in the same session.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
International data pulls in Excel have some predictable friction.
When your country names do not match Census country codes
Your workbook has "South Korea" and the IDB uses "Korea, South."
Normalize the country names in my workbook to match Census IDB country codes. Then pull IDB total population projections for 2025, 2030, and 2035 for each country and write them into columns B, C, and D.
When you need demographic indicators instead of raw projections
Your workforce model needs fertility rate, life expectancy, and infant mortality rather than total population.
Fetch Census IDB demographic indicators — total fertility rate, life expectancy at birth, and infant mortality rate — for all countries in column A and write results into columns B, C, and D using the most recent available IDB vintage.
When you need to filter to countries above a workforce-size threshold
Your regional VP wants to focus only on markets where the 20–64 population in 2030 exceeds 5 million.
Fetch Census IDB projected population aged 20–64 for 2030 for all countries in column A. Filter to countries where the 2030 projection exceeds 5 million and write those rows, sorted by 2030 population descending, into a new tab called Priority Markets.
When you need projections plus a labor-cost proxy in one combined analysis
Your board slide needs workforce size and a cost signal in the same table.
Fetch Census IDB projected population for 2025, 2030, and 2035 for each country in column A and write them into columns B, C, and D. Look up the labor cost index for each country from the Cost Index tab (country in column A, index in column B) and write the index into column E. Compute a combined opportunity score (2035 population × (1 / cost index)) and write it into column F. Rank by score descending.
The pattern: official Census projections, your own cost data, and the board-ready ranking in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a list of countries, then ask it to pull Census IDB population projections or demographic indicators. The Census Bureau integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to import Census Economic Indicators time series or the Census Bureau in Excel overview.