The Scenario
You're the social media manager. It's Tuesday morning and you've just received a list of 120 affiliate URLs from the partner team — all of them long, all of them destined for Instagram and Twitter posts going out this week. They're in column A of your Excel workbook, right where you expected them.
Column C has custom aliases for about thirty of the rows — specific branded slugs the partner wants used for attribution tracking. The rest can be auto-generated. Everything needs a Cutt.ly short link in column B before the copy deck goes to the designer at 3 PM.
The bad version:
- Open Cutt.ly in a browser tab, paste row 1's URL, check if column C has an alias and add it manually if so, copy the result, switch back to Excel, paste into B1
- Repeat 119 more times, keeping track of which rows had aliases and which didn't
- Realize at row 74 that you skipped the alias on row 31 and now need to re-shorten that one with the correct slug before it gets used
The copy deck goes to the designer in four hours. You're also supposed to be reviewing creative briefs, answering campaign questions, and attending a 1 PM standup. There's no version of this where manually shortening 120 links row by row fits inside that window.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your data, understands the structure, and through its built-in Cutt.ly integration it can shorten every URL in your column and write the results back — handling custom aliases from a separate column wherever they're present, auto-generating slugs for the rest.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this:
Shorten all 120 URLs in column A of my Excel sheet using Cutt.ly and put the resulting short links in column B — if a custom alias is provided in column C, use it for that row; if not, let Cutt.ly generate the slug automatically
What You Get
- Column B fills with Cutt.ly short links, one per row
- Rows where column C had an alias get that branded slug in the short URL
- Rows with no alias get a Cutt.ly-generated slug
- Any row where the URL in column A is blank or malformed is flagged with a note in column B rather than silently skipped
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The URLs in column A have tracking parameters appended inconsistently
Some rows end with ?utm_source=partner and some don't. You want them shortened as-is, preserving whatever parameters exist.
For every non-empty URL in column A, shorten it with Cutt.ly exactly as written — do not strip or modify any query parameters — and write the short link into column B
Column C has aliases for some rows but others have stale placeholders like "TBD"
You want to use a column C value only when it's a real string, not a placeholder.
Shorten each URL in column A using Cutt.ly and write the result into column B — use the alias from column C only if that cell contains a value other than blank, "TBD", or "N/A"; otherwise let Cutt.ly auto-generate the slug
The URLs are spread across two worksheets — "Brand Links" and "Partner Links"
Both sheets have a URL column and you want short links for both, written back into each sheet's own column B.
Shorten all URLs in column A of the "Brand Links" worksheet using Cutt.ly and write results into column B of that sheet; then do the same for column A of the "Partner Links" worksheet
Some rows already have a short link in column B and you don't want to re-shorten them
Plus column A still has some blank rows where the partner hasn't sent the URL yet, and you want a report in column D showing which rows succeeded, which were skipped because they already had a short link, and which were skipped because column A was empty.
For each row in my workbook where column A has a URL and column B is currently empty, use Cutt.ly to shorten the URL and write the short link into column B — apply any alias from column C if present; then write a status note into column D for every row: "shortened", "already had link", or "no URL"
One prompt, one pass. No pre-cleaning required.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of long links — affiliate URLs, landing pages, campaign destinations — then ask it to bulk-shorten them with Cutt.ly and handle your alias column in the same step. You can also explore the link history spoke to build a master registry of everything you've shortened.