The Scenario
You are a research ops manager at a 50-person product team. New quarter starts Monday. You need to plan research capacity — who is working on what, which projects are active, which are wrapping up. But you cannot plan against a list that only exists inside Dovetail's sidebar.
You want every project in an Excel workbook. Name, ID, created date, so you can sort by age, filter by product area, and drop it into the capacity planning doc.
It is Friday at 11 AM.
The bad version of Friday:
- Open Dovetail, look at the project list in the sidebar
- Copy the first project name into the workbook
- Click into the project to find the created date, copy that, switch back to Excel
- Find the project ID in the URL or settings, copy that too
- Repeat for however many projects your workspace has
- Lose count around project eighteen and have to start over
- You have a partial list and a meeting in twenty minutes.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that fetches your full Dovetail project list and writes it into the workbook, so you never have to click through the Dovetail sidebar.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all Dovetail projects in my workspace. Write project ID, name, and created date into a new tab called 'Project Directory.'
SheetXAI pulls every project from your Dovetail workspace and writes the full list into a new tab. Project Directory is ready before your meeting.
What You Get
A complete Excel inventory of your Dovetail workspace:
- Column A — Dovetail project ID
- Column B — project name as it appears in Dovetail
- Column C — created date
The project IDs in column A are the useful part. Once you have them in the workbook, you can pass them to other SheetXAI prompts — importing insights from specific projects, querying only certain projects in a magic search, or updating notes filtered to a particular project.
The directory also ages well. Run the same prompt next quarter and it reflects whatever projects were added or renamed in the interim.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Dovetail workspace inventories have their own complications. SheetXAI handles the enrichment and filtering in the same pull.
When you want the project list filtered to a specific folder or team
Your Dovetail workspace has dozens of projects but you only care about the ones in the "Product Team" folder for capacity planning.
List all Dovetail projects in my workspace that belong to the 'Product Team' folder. Write project ID, name, and created date into the 'Project Directory' tab. Sort by created date descending.
When you want to enrich the directory with insight counts per project
The capacity plan needs to show which projects are most active, not just which exist.
List all Dovetail projects in my workspace. For each project, also retrieve the number of insights it contains. Write project ID, name, created date, and insight count into the 'Project Directory' tab. Sort by insight count descending.
When you want to flag which projects have had no activity in the last 90 days
Stale projects clutter the workspace. You want to mark them for archiving.
List all Dovetail projects in my workspace. For each project, check the date of the most recent activity. Write project ID, name, created date, and last activity date into the 'Project Directory' tab. In column E, write "STALE" if last activity was more than 90 days ago, or "ACTIVE" if it was within 90 days.
When you need the directory cross-referenced with your team's ownership tracker
You have an existing 'Research Ownership' tab that maps project names to team owners. You want to pull the Dovetail project list and match it against the ownership tab.
List all Dovetail projects in my workspace and write project ID and name into columns A and B of the 'Project Directory' tab. Then look up each project name in the 'Research Ownership' tab (column A = project name, column B = owner). Write the matching owner into column C of the 'Project Directory' tab. If no match is found, write "UNASSIGNED."
The pattern: pull the directory, enrich it with what matters, hand the capacity planning doc to the team before the quarter starts.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull your full Dovetail project list into an Excel workbook. The Dovetail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export all insights to a workbook or the Dovetail in Excel overview.