The Scenario
Every week, the same Slack message lands in the content channel: "Can someone pull together the tech and finance news for the roundup?" And every week, the same two or three people on the team are the ones who actually do it — opening a browser, scanning aggregators, copying headlines into a shared workbook, arguing about whether something is "tech" or "business," and then reformatting the whole thing before it goes to the editor.
You joined the fintech startup three months ago to do content strategy. Somewhere along the way, you became the person who runs the weekly news pull.
The bad version:
- Hit the Currents API technology endpoint in a browser, scroll through the JSON, pull out the 20 most recent articles — headline, author, source, URL — paste them into the workbook
- Switch to the finance endpoint, do the same thing, add a Category column, go back and tag all the tech rows "Technology," tag all the finance rows "Finance"
- Sort by publish date, realize the timestamps aren't in a consistent format between the two category pulls, spend fifteen minutes cleaning the date column before you can sort it properly
Forty minutes of admin for a workbook that your editor uses for about eight minutes to pick which three articles to cite. You are not what the content budget is for.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that runs inside your Excel workbook. It reads your workbook, understands your column structure, and through its built-in Currents API integration it can fetch categorized news and write results directly into the right worksheet — clean, sorted, labeled.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and ask:
Fetch 30 recent business news articles from Currents API filtered to English-language sources and paste them into my Excel workbook with columns: Category, Headline, Author, Source, Publish Date, and URL — sort by publish date descending
What You Get
- Column A: Category label — "Business" (or whichever categories you request)
- Column B: article headline
- Column C: author name (or "Unknown" if not provided by the API)
- Column D: source or publication name
- Column E: publish date formatted consistently as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM
- Column F: full article URL
- Sorted newest-first
- Date formatting normalized before it lands — no mixed timestamp formats
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want technology and finance added as separate categories alongside business
The editor wants three distinct category groups this week, each with 20 articles.
Fetch 20 technology, 20 finance, and 20 business news articles from Currents API published in the last 24 hours and write Category, Headline, Author, Source, Publish Date, and URL into the "Weekly Digest" worksheet — sort newest first across all three categories
The workbook already has last week's articles and you don't want them overwritten
You keep a running log, so this week's articles should append below last week's, not replace them.
Find the last row with data in the "Weekly Digest" worksheet and append 20 technology and 20 finance articles from Currents API published today, adding Category, Headline, Author, Source, Publish Date, and URL below the existing content — don't touch any rows above
You need to flag articles from a specific source your editor always ignores
There are two or three outlets your editor has explicitly said to skip. You want them flagged rather than removed so you can confirm they're filtered correctly.
Fetch 20 technology and 20 finance articles from Currents API published in the last 24 hours, write results into the "Weekly Digest" worksheet with the standard columns, and add a "Flag" column where any article from TechCrunch or ZeroHedge is marked "SKIP"
Full kill chain: clear the old digest, fetch this week's content, flag sources, and write a summary
The digest worksheet is stale from two weeks ago when the process broke down. You want everything fresh.
Clear all rows below the header in the "Weekly Digest" worksheet, then fetch 20 technology, 20 finance, and 20 business articles from Currents API published in the last 48 hours, write Category, Headline, Author, Source, Publish Date, and URL into the worksheet sorted newest-first, flag any results from TechCrunch or ZeroHedge in a "Flag" column, and write a summary row at the bottom showing how many articles were pulled per category
One prompt, one pass — the digest is built, sourced, and flagged before the editor pings you.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your content planning workbook, then ask it to pull this week's categorized news from Currents API and populate the digest worksheet in one shot. For related workflows, see how to bulk fetch competitor news or browse the full Currents API guide.