How to Connect Curated to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Curated

You have an Excel workbook full of data — URLs collected over the week, subscriber emails, issue performance numbers. You need that data pushed into Curated, or pulled back out, without spending half a morning on data entry.

Curated is good at turning collected links into polished newsletter drafts. But the moment your link library, your subscriber list, or your issue history lives in a workbook, you're copying manually between two tools that have no connection to each other.

The usual flow is: export from one, open the other, paste row by row, fix the formatting, repeat. Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: CSV Export and Re-Import

The default for Excel users. You export your workbook to CSV, open Curated, look for a bulk import option, realize there isn't one for link collections, and go back to copying rows by hand anyway. Or you find an import endpoint and spend twenty minutes formatting your CSV to match what Curated expects.

It's workable once. It becomes grinding the moment it's a recurring part of your newsletter workflow. Forty links this week, sixty next week, and you're still sitting there formatting column headers to match an API spec instead of writing the content your readers actually subscribed for.

The real cost isn't the time it takes for any single run. It's what it does to your relationship with a task you're supposed to enjoy.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has Curated connector options available through its HTTP action flow. You can build a trigger on a new row in your workbook, call the Curated API, and push links or pull subscriber data through.

Quick checkpoint — do you know what a flow trigger is in Power Automate? An HTTP action? How to authenticate an API call using a Bearer token? How to map Excel column values to a JSON request body? If those questions feel foreign, skip to Method 3 or 4.

If you're still reading: the flow works. You set a trigger on your worksheet, map your URL column to the Curated API's url field, pass the title field through, authenticate with your API key, and the flow fires when a row appears.

But one row at a time is not the same as bulk import.

Fifty links means fifty flow runs, fifty API calls, and a run history that buries any errors in a list you have to scroll through manually to find what went wrong.

You probably just need those fifty URLs inside this week's draft. You probably have no idea how to debug a failed Power Automate run. So this becomes a problem you hand off to whoever manages your Microsoft environment, and now you're waiting and your send date is fixed.

And once the task gets more complex — only include rows where column D says "ready," skip duplicates, build the draft automatically after adding the links — Power Automate's native capabilities stop being the answer.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for workbook ↔ Curated workflows was a category of add-ins built around saved column mappings. You configured your fields once, saved a template, and ran it on demand.

That was a real step forward from doing everything by hand. Your mappings were reusable, the output was consistent, your team didn't have to redo the setup every week.

But you were still deciding which rows to include, what to rename your columns to match Curated's API expectations, and what to do when a URL came back invalid. The add-in moved the data; every editorial and conditional decision stayed with you. And the moment a column shifted — someone added a new field, renamed a worksheet — the template broke until someone fixed it manually.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it required a dedicated operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Curated integration it can push to or pull from Curated for you. No template configuration, no automation glue, no row-by-row copying. You just ask.

Example 1: Bulk import a week's worth of links into a Curated draft

Add every row from my Excel sheet as a new link to my Curated publication — use column A as the URL, column B as the title, and column C as the description

Every row becomes a link in your Curated link collection in one shot. No row-by-row copying, no formatting column headers to match an API spec.

Example 2: Pull your subscriber list and cross-reference against your CRM

Pull my full Curated subscriber list into my Excel sheet, then highlight in yellow any emails that also appear in column A of the 'CRM Contacts' sheet

SheetXAI handles the pull and the cross-reference in one pass. The overlap comes back highlighted without opening anything else.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you're collecting links or tracking newsletter data, then ask it to do one of the tasks above. The Curated integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.