The Scenario
You are a content operations manager. It is Tuesday morning and the editorial team just handed you an Excel workbook of 120 blog post stubs: title in column A, author in column B, category in column C, and a body text draft in column D.
Every one of those rows needs to become a blogPost entry in Contentful's master environment. The campaign starts Friday.
The bad version of Tuesday:
- You open Contentful's web app
- You click "Add entry," select the blogPost content type, copy the title from the workbook, paste it, tab over to author, copy, paste, tab to category, copy, paste, copy the body text, paste it, click Save
- You repeat this for 120 rows
- Your wrist hurts by entry twenty
- You transpose two authors around row sixty and do not notice
- The campaign goes live Friday with wrong bylines on six posts.
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 data and calls Contentful for you, so you never have to open the Contentful web app for a bulk operation.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Contentful entry of content type blogPost for each row in this workbook. Use the title from column A, the author from column B, the category from column C, and the body text from column D. Write the resulting entry ID back to column E for each row.
SheetXAI reads all 120 rows, creates a Contentful entry for each one, and writes every entry ID back to column E. You end up with a workbook that has a Contentful ID on every row—a clean record of exactly what was created and where.
What You Get
A completed batch of 120 Contentful entries, plus a live audit trail in the workbook:
- Entry IDs in column E — one per row, matched to the source data
- All fields populated — title, author, category, and body text exactly as they appear in the workbook
- Draft status — entries are created as drafts, ready for editorial review before publishing
- No transposition errors — the data comes from the cell, not from a human copy-pasting
The column E IDs become your reference layer. Need to bulk-publish later? Run a second prompt using column E. Need to update the body text after an edit? Same column E. The entry ID written back to the workbook is what connects the planning artifact to the live CMS.
Want to also set a featured image or a related-articles field? Tell SheetXAI which column has the asset IDs or the related entry IDs, and it will set those fields in the same pass.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real content workbooks are not always clean before a campaign. SheetXAI handles cleanup and entry creation in the same prompt.
When category values are inconsistent
Your workbook has "Tech," "Technology," and "tech" in column C, but your Contentful content type expects one canonical category slug.
Normalize the category values in column C to match these canonical slugs: technology, marketing, product, design. Then create a blogPost entry for each row using the normalized category. Write the entry ID to column E.
When some rows are missing a body text draft
Thirty rows have a body text draft in column D. The remaining ninety have a placeholder like "TBD" or are blank.
For rows where column D is blank or says TBD, write "Draft pending" as a placeholder body. Then create blogPost entries for all 120 rows using the values in columns A, B, C, and the filled column D. Write each entry ID to column E.
When you only want to create entries for a specific category
The editorial lead says to start with just the "marketing" posts this sprint.
Filter to rows where column C says "marketing" or "Marketing." Create a blogPost entry in Contentful for each of those rows using the title from column A, author from column B, and body from column D. Write each entry ID to column E on the matching row.
When the workbook has duplicates and missing authors
The workbook was assembled from three separate editorial trackers and has duplicate titles and blank author cells.
Deduplicate rows by the title in column A, keeping the first occurrence. For rows where column B is blank, set the author to "Editorial Team." Then create a blogPost entry for each remaining row using the cleaned data and write the entry ID to column E.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the workbook first and then running the import, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the conditional logic inline.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any content planning workbook, then ask it to create entries in Contentful for each row. The Contentful integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-publish draft entries or the Contentful in Excel overview.