The Scenario
Your HR team is transitioning to Fillout for onboarding workflows. Someone handed you an Excel workbook with 150 new employee records — first name, last name, email, start date, department — and asked you to get them into the 'Onboarding' table in Fillout so the onboarding flow kicks off for each person.
The bad version:
- Open Fillout, click 'Add record,' fill in five fields for the first employee, save, click 'Add record' again
- Lose your place around record 30, accidentally duplicate a row, and spend twenty minutes sorting out which entries are real
- Still have 120 records to go when your workday is supposed to end
This is a data entry job that exists solely because there's no easy bridge between a workbook and a Fillout table. You weren't hired to manually re-create rows that already exist in a file.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook data and pushes it into Fillout by creating new records in the table you specify — no field mapping template required.
Read all 80 product rows from this Excel sheet and insert them into the 'Product Catalog' table in my Fillout database, mapping column headers to field names
What You Get
- One Fillout record created per sheet row, with field values mapped from each column
- A confirmation in the SheetXAI sidebar showing how many records were created
- Any rows that failed validation (missing required field, wrong format) reported individually so you can fix them without rerunning the whole batch
- The original workbook is unchanged — records were read, not modified
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The start date column is formatted as text strings, not ISO dates
Read all rows from this Excel sheet starting at row 2 (columns A through E), convert the Start Date values in column D from MM/DD/YYYY format to YYYY-MM-DD, then create a new record in my Fillout 'Onboarding' table for each row
The department column uses informal values that don't match Fillout's dropdown options
Read all rows from this Excel sheet starting at row 2, normalize the Department column (column E) before inserting: map 'Engineering' to 'eng', 'Marketing' to 'mktg', 'Finance' to 'fin', then create a Fillout 'Onboarding' record for each row
Employee data is split across two worksheets — full-time in 'FT' and contractors in 'CT'
Read all rows from my 'FT' worksheet and create Fillout 'Onboarding' records for each with employment_type set to 'full-time', then do the same for my 'CT' worksheet with employment_type set to 'contractor'
Clean the data, filter to eligible rows, and create records in one step
Read all rows from this Excel sheet starting at row 2, skip any rows where email is blank or start date is missing, trim leading and trailing spaces from all text fields, and create a Fillout 'Onboarding' record for each remaining row — report which rows were skipped and why
The approach: validation cleanup and record creation are one operation. You're not cleaning the workbook first, then running the import.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook with your new employee records, then ask it to push them into your Fillout onboarding table. The spoke on bulk updating existing records covers what to do when those employees' statuses change — and the hub overview lays out all four methods side by side.