The Scenario
You are a product manager. Roadmap season. Twenty strategic questions sitting in an Excel workbook, the Research Questions tab, column A. Things like "What friction points prevent enterprise users from completing onboarding?" and "What do users say is missing from the reporting tab?"
You know the answers are somewhere in your Dovetail workspace. Three years of research, hundreds of insights, thousands of tagged highlights. You just need to surface the right ones for each question before the Thursday roadmap session.
It is Tuesday at 9 AM.
The bad version of the next two days:
- Open Dovetail, run a magic search for question one, read through the results, pick the best insight
- Copy the insight title and snippet into the workbook, manually note the project it came from
- Go back to the workbook, run question two in Dovetail
- Repeat twenty times, switching between the workbook and the Dovetail search UI
- By question twelve your eyes are glazing over and you are copy-pasting the wrong snippets
- You walk into Thursday with answers for fourteen questions and say the rest are "still being investigated."
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads each question, queries Dovetail's research library, and writes the top matching insight back into the workbook — so you never have to switch tools.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each question in column A of the Research Questions tab, run a Dovetail magic search and paste the top matching insight title and snippet into columns B and C.
SheetXAI runs twenty separate Dovetail searches, one per row, and writes the best result for each into the corresponding row of the tab. Twenty questions. Twenty answers. All in columns B and C before you finish your coffee.
What You Get
An Excel workbook with all twenty questions answered from your existing Dovetail research:
- Column A — your strategic question (unchanged)
- Column B — the title of the top matching Dovetail insight
- Column C — the relevant snippet or highlight from that insight
The value is not that you found answers. The value is that you found them in your own research, not in a generic benchmark or a hallucinated summary. The insight comes from the interviews and data your team already collected.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Research question sets are rarely clean or well-formed. SheetXAI handles the prep and the search in the same prompt.
When some questions are too vague for a good Dovetail search
Questions like "What do users think?" will return everything. You want SheetXAI to sharpen the query before searching.
For each question in column A of the Research Questions tab, rephrase it as a specific search query (more concrete, less than 15 words) and write the rephrased version into column B. Then run a Dovetail magic search for each rephrased query and write the top insight title and snippet into columns C and D.
When you want the top three results instead of just one
The roadmap session will have debate. You want options per question, not one answer.
For each question in column A of the Research Questions tab, run a Dovetail magic search and write the top 3 matching insight titles and their project names into columns B, C, and D respectively.
When you want to filter results to a specific Dovetail project
You only want answers from the enterprise research, not from the consumer product work.
For each question in column A of the Research Questions tab, run a Dovetail magic search filtered to the project 'Enterprise Research 2025.' Write the top matching insight title and snippet into columns B and C. If no match is found within that project, write "No match in Enterprise Research 2025" into column B.
When the questions cover multiple themes and you want them grouped before searching
The twenty questions span onboarding, reporting, and billing themes. You want the results grouped so the roadmap session follows the same structure.
Read the Research Questions tab. Group the questions by theme (Onboarding, Reporting, Billing) based on column A and write the theme label into column B. Then for each question, run a Dovetail magic search and write the top matching insight title and snippet into columns C and D. Sort the output by theme.
The pattern: query your research library at scale, get structured answers back in the workbook, walk into the roadmap session with evidence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with strategic questions, user research prompts, or hypothesis statements, then ask it to query Dovetail and write back the results. The Dovetail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export all Dovetail insights to a workbook or the Dovetail in Excel overview.