The Scenario
You are a research lead. Tomorrow is your last day. The team asked you to leave behind a complete archive of all the insights from the Enterprise Research 2025 Dovetail project before you go — ninety insights across eight months of work.
Your manager wants the archive in an Excel workbook. It is 2 PM and your offboarding call is at 4 PM.
The bad version of the next two hours:
- Open Dovetail, navigate to the Enterprise Research 2025 project
- Click the first insight, read the title and body, copy the title into the workbook
- Copy the body, record the insight ID, note the created date
- Go back to Dovetail, click the next insight
- Do this ninety times
- Make it through forty-two before the 4 PM call
- You leave the company with half the archive done and no time to finish.
The fast version is one prompt and the archive is ready before your manager's email even arrives.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads all ninety Dovetail insights and writes the complete archive into the workbook, so you do not have to click through the Dovetail UI once.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all insights in the Dovetail project 'Enterprise Research 2025.' Export each insight's title and body in plain text and write them into a new tab called 'Insights Archive' with columns: InsightID, Title, Body, CreatedAt.
SheetXAI pulls the full list of insights from the project, creates the Insights Archive tab if it does not exist, and writes all ninety rows. Title, body, ID, creation date. Done before the 4 PM call.
What You Get
A complete Excel archive of the Dovetail project:
- InsightID — the Dovetail ID for each insight
- Title — the insight title as it appears in Dovetail
- Body — the full insight body in plain text
- CreatedAt — when the insight was created
The InsightIDs are not just for reference. If the incoming research lead wants to update any insight later, they can look it up by ID directly. The workbook becomes the index.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Research project archives are not always straightforward. SheetXAI handles the edge cases in the same pull.
When insights are spread across multiple Dovetail projects
The work for one product area spans three separate Dovetail projects. You want them all in one tab.
List all insights from the following Dovetail projects: 'Enterprise Research 2025,' 'Mobile Onboarding 2025,' and 'API Developer Research Q4.' Write all insights into a single 'Insights Archive' tab with columns: InsightID, Title, Body, ProjectName, CreatedAt. Sort by ProjectName then by CreatedAt.
When you want only published insights, not drafts
The project has a mix of published and draft insights. The archive should only include what was formally published.
List all published insights from the Dovetail project 'Enterprise Research 2025.' Skip any draft or unpublished insights. Write InsightID, Title, Body, and CreatedAt into the Insights Archive tab.
When the team wants the body text cleaned up for the archive
Some insight bodies have formatting artifacts from how they were created — extra blank lines, markdown header symbols, editor-specific characters.
Pull all insights from 'Enterprise Research 2025.' For each insight body, strip any markdown formatting characters (##, **, _, bullet symbols) so the body reads as plain text. Write InsightID, Title, cleaned Body, and CreatedAt into the Insights Archive tab.
When you need the archive cross-referenced with the original research data
The team wants to know which data items each insight was tagged from, so the archive is traceable back to source.
List all insights from 'Enterprise Research 2025.' For each insight, retrieve the IDs of any data items it is linked to. Write InsightID, Title, Body, CreatedAt, and a comma-separated list of linked DataItemIDs into the Insights Archive tab.
The pattern: pull the knowledge, clean it, cross-reference it, all in one prompt. The archive is ready before the conversation ends.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to export any Dovetail project's insights into an Excel workbook. The Dovetail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull your full project directory into a workbook or the Dovetail in Excel overview.