The Scenario
You are a UX research ops manager. A 60-participant study just wrapped. The participants are in an Excel workbook, the Study Participants tab, with columns for Name and Email. Before the research team can start tagging their interview data to the right people, every participant needs to exist as a Dovetail contact.
The team starts tagging tomorrow at 9 AM. It is today at 3 PM.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- Open Dovetail, navigate to Contacts
- Click "Add contact," type the name, type the email, save
- Switch back to Excel, next row
- Do this sixty times
- Somewhere around contact forty you realize you have been typing emails in the name field
- You spend twenty minutes deleting and recreating the broken contacts.
The fast version is one prompt and the team has a clean contact list before close of business.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the participant list and creates the Dovetail contacts in bulk, so you never have to open the Contacts section of the Dovetail UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read every row in the Study Participants tab of this workbook (columns: Name, Email). Create a Dovetail contact for each row using Name and Email. Write the returned Dovetail contact ID into column C for each row.
SheetXAI reads all sixty rows, creates one Dovetail contact per row, and writes the contact IDs back into column C. The team can start tagging data items to the right participants tomorrow morning.
What You Get
Sixty Dovetail contacts, each with name and email registered:
- Name — from column A
- Email — from column B
- Dovetail contact ID — written back into column C for reference
The contact IDs in column C are the useful part. Once the IDs are in the workbook, you can run a follow-up prompt to associate each contact with specific data items, insights, or projects by ID. The workbook becomes the index that connects the Excel world to the Dovetail world.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Participant lists from recruiting tools are never clean. SheetXAI handles the data quality issues before the Dovetail creation.
When names are in a single column instead of split first/last
The export has full names in one column. You want them split before creating Dovetail contacts.
For each row in the Study Participants tab, split the Name column into FirstName and LastName and write them into columns C and D. Then create a Dovetail contact per row using FirstName and LastName as the name fields and Email as the email. Write the returned contact ID into column E.
When some emails are duplicated
The recruiting export has a few participants who signed up twice. You do not want duplicate contacts in Dovetail.
Deduplicate the Study Participants tab by Email, keeping the first occurrence of each email address. Create Dovetail contacts for the deduplicated rows. Write the returned contact ID into column C. For rows removed as duplicates, write "DUPLICATE — skipped" into column C.
When the tab is missing emails for some participants
Some rows have only a name. You want contacts created for everyone but flagged when the email is blank.
For each row in the Study Participants tab where Email is blank, create the Dovetail contact using only the Name field, and write "CREATED — no email" into column C. For rows with both Name and Email, create the contact normally and write the returned contact ID into column C.
When you need contacts created and immediately associated with the study's Dovetail project
The team wants to link participants to the project in Dovetail in the same operation, not as a separate step.
Read the Study Participants tab (columns: Name, Email). Create a Dovetail contact for each row. Then associate each newly created contact with the Dovetail project 'Q2 Mobile App Study.' Write the returned contact ID into column C and confirmation of the project association into column D.
The pattern: create the contacts and wire them to the right project in the same prompt. No two-step flow.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any participant list or contact tab, then ask it to create the Dovetail contacts in bulk. The Dovetail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk import interview notes or the Dovetail in Excel overview.