The Scenario
You are a news editor managing a content calendar. You have an Excel workbook of 30 article entries with their planned publish times: entry ID in column A, publish date and time in ISO 8601 format in column B.
Every one of those entries needs a scheduled publish action in Contentful so the articles go live automatically at the right time.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- Your assistant opens Contentful, searches for the first entry ID, opens the entry, clicks the publish arrow, selects "Schedule publish," types the date, types the time, confirms
- She repeats this 30 times
- Around entry twenty she accidentally sets an entry to publish at 2 PM instead of 2 AM
- Your overnight readers see tomorrow's stories at 2 PM today.
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 timestamps and calls Contentful's scheduled actions API for each row.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a scheduled publish action in Contentful for each entry ID in column A, using the publish timestamp from column B. The timestamps are in ISO 8601 format.
SheetXAI reads the 30 rows and creates a scheduled publish action for each entry. Every article is queued to go live at exactly the time specified in the workbook.
What You Get
30 Contentful scheduled publish actions, one per entry:
- Entry ID — from column A
- Publish time — from column B, exact to the minute
- Confirmation — ask SheetXAI to write the scheduled action ID to column C for each row
The ISO 8601 format in the workbook is what Contentful expects. No timezone ambiguity or AM/PM confusion.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Editorial calendars are rarely clean on deadline day.
When publish timestamps are in a non-ISO format
Your workbook has "May 14, 2026 at 9:00 AM EDT" in column B instead of ISO 8601.
Convert the timestamps in column B from the format "Month D, YYYY at H:MM AM/PM TZ" to ISO 8601 format in UTC. Then create a scheduled publish action in Contentful for each entry ID in column A using the converted timestamp.
When some entries are already published and should be skipped
Before creating scheduled publish actions, check whether each entry in column A is already published in Contentful. Skip any that are already live. For the rest, create a scheduled publish action using the timestamp in column B.
When you want to schedule publish and unpublish in the same pass
For each entry in column A, create a scheduled publish action using the timestamp in column B. Also create a scheduled unpublish action 48 hours after that timestamp. Write the publish action ID to column C and the unpublish action ID to column D.
When the content calendar has gaps you need to fill before scheduling
For rows where column B says "TBD," set the publish time to midnight UTC on the day in column C. Then create scheduled publish actions for all 30 rows using the finalized timestamps. Write the action IDs to column D.
The pattern: timestamp normalization, status checks, and schedule creation all happen in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any publishing calendar workbook, then ask it to create scheduled publish actions in Contentful. 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.