The Scenario
You are the content lead for a marketing team. Campaign launch is tomorrow at 8 AM. You have 45 approved content entries sitting in draft in Contentful. Their entry IDs are listed in an Excel workbook—column A has the IDs, column B has the content title, column C has the approval status.
You need all 45 published tonight.
The bad version of tonight:
- Your manager opens Contentful
- She searches for the first entry ID, opens the entry, clicks Publish, confirms
- She repeats this 45 times
- Around entry thirty she gets a browser timeout and has to log back in
- She loses track of which ones she has already published
- She publishes the same entry twice and skips one she thought she had done
- At 8 AM, thirty-nine of forty-five entries are live. The campaign is missing 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 entry IDs and calls Contentful's publish action for each one.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Publish each Contentful entry whose ID is in column A of this workbook. Only publish rows where column C says "Approved."
SheetXAI reads the workbook, filters to approved rows, and calls the Contentful publish action for each entry ID. All 45 approved entries go live.
What You Get
45 Contentful entries published, with no manual clicking required:
- Status-filtered — only rows where column C is "Approved" get published
- All 45 covered — no skipped entries, no double-publishes
- Confirmation column — ask SheetXAI to write "Published" to column D for each entry it confirms
The Approved filter is the safety valve. Entries still in review are not touched.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Approval workbooks are rarely perfectly clean when a deadline arrives.
When approval status is inconsistent
Column C has "Approved," "approved," "APPROVED," and "Yes" all meaning the same thing.
Treat any value in column C that is a variation of "approved" or "yes" as approved. Publish the Contentful entry for each of those rows.
When some entry IDs are duplicated
The workbook was assembled from two editorial trackers and a few IDs appear twice.
Deduplicate rows by entry ID in column A. Then publish each unique entry where column C says "Approved."
When you want to publish only a specific content type
The workbook contains entries of multiple content types but you only want to publish the article entries tonight.
For each row where column C is "Approved," check the Contentful entry type in column D. Publish only the entries whose content type is article.
When entries need to be un-archived before they can be published
A handful of entries in the workbook were previously archived and cannot be published directly.
For each row where column C is "Approved," check whether the Contentful entry in column A is archived. If it is, unarchive it first, then publish it. If it is not archived, publish it directly. Write the result—"Published" or "Error"—to column E.
The pattern: approval status, deduplication, and content type filtering all happen in the same prompt as the publish action.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any approval tracking workbook, then ask it to publish the approved entries in Contentful. The Contentful integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to schedule publish actions or the Contentful in Excel overview.