The Scenario
Someone on the data team ran a deduplication script last week. It produced a clean output: an Excel workbook with 40 rows, each one a pair of Engage user IDs — column A is the source (the duplicate), column B is the destination (the record to keep). The work was supposed to take a day. The script took an hour. What nobody accounted for is that calling the Engage merge API for each pair, in the right order, is its own separate project.
The bad version:
- Open Engage. Search for the source user ID in row 1. Open their profile. Find the merge action. Enter the destination user ID. Confirm. Go back. Search for row 2's source user ID. Repeat 39 more times.
- Try the API directly. Read the merge endpoint docs. Figure out which parameter is "source" and which is "destination." Write a quick script. Run it. Row 7 fails because the source user was already merged in a previous cleanup run. The script stops. You don't know which of the remaining 33 pairs it got to.
- Restart the script with error handling. Let it run. Check the output. 38 merged, 2 failures. Spend 20 minutes figuring out which 2 rows failed and why.
The dedup work is done. The Engage cleanup is not.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the dedup table and calls the Engage merge API for each pair — in order, with error handling, without you writing a script.
Read my Excel deduplication table with source user IDs in column A and target user IDs in column B, and merge each pair in Engage so the source is absorbed into the destination
What You Get
- Each source user ID merged into the corresponding destination user ID in Engage, in row order.
- A status written back to column C for each row — "merged" for successes, the error reason for any that failed (already merged, user not found, etc.).
- Messaging history from the source profile consolidated into the destination record, per Engage's merge behavior.
- A clear audit trail in the workbook showing exactly which pairs went through and which didn't.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some source user IDs may already have been merged in a previous cleanup — handle those gracefully
For each row in my Excel workbook where column A is the source user ID and column B is the destination, merge the source into the destination in Engage. If the source user is not found or has already been merged, write 'already resolved' to column C. Otherwise write 'merged' or the error.
The workbook has source and destination reversed for some rows — column C flags which direction is correct
For each row in my Excel workbook: if column C is 'normal', merge column A into column B. If column C is 'reversed', merge column B into column A. Write the result to column D.
You want to verify both user IDs exist in Engage before attempting each merge
For each row in my Excel workbook: check that both the user ID in column A and the user ID in column B exist in Engage. If either doesn't exist, write 'user not found' to column C and skip the merge. If both exist, merge column A into column B and write 'merged' to column C.
Deduplicate the merge table itself (same pair listed twice) before running anything
Deduplicate my Excel workbook by the pair of values in columns A and B, keeping the first occurrence of each unique pair. Then merge each source user ID (column A) into the destination (column B) in Engage and write the result to column C.
When verification, dedup, and execution all happen in one prompt, you're not writing a script — you're writing a sentence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook with your dedup pairs, then ask it to run all the Engage merges. Also see bulk-archiving Engage users or the full Engage integration overview.