The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Folk
You have an Excel workbook full of contacts — names, emails, companies, job titles from a trade show, enriched by a third-party tool, or inherited from whoever ran sales before you. Folk is where your team tracks the actual relationships. But moving data between the two is a project nobody planned for.
Folk's relationship intelligence only works if the right people are in it. But the right people are almost always in a spreadsheet first. The default flow is: export from wherever the data lives, open Folk, manually enter each record, fill in the fields you remember, and keep going until you run out of patience somewhere around row 35.
Below are the four ways teams handle this. Only the last one holds up when the list is long.
Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste
The default. Open Folk, click "New Contact," type the name from the workbook, tab to email, tab to company. Save. Start again.
For a list of ten people, you get through it. For 120 target accounts before the sales kick-off, the experience changes. You start at a good clip, slow down as the rows blur together, and end up copy-pasting the wrong domain into the wrong company record somewhere in the middle. The contacts get in. The accuracy does not follow. And for Excel users, this often means CSV export followed by a manual import that loses formatting and silently drops rows — which you won't catch until Folk has 97 records instead of 120.
Method 2: Power Automate
Power Automate has a Folk connector. You can wire a trigger on a new sheet row, call Folk's API, and write the contact through.
Quick gut-check before diving deeper: are you comfortable building flows in Power Automate? Do you know what an action step looks like, how to handle dynamic content, what happens when a required field is missing from the row? If that sounds like it belongs in someone else's inbox, skip to Method 3 or 4 now.
If you're still here: yes, Power Automate can do this. You set up the trigger, authenticate to Folk, map every column to the corresponding Folk field, and add error handling for rows that will fail — blank emails, records that already exist, field type mismatches. It works when it's built correctly. Building it correctly takes a few hours on the short end.
And after you've built it, the structural reality doesn't change.
One row at a time. Importing 200 enriched contacts means 200 trigger fires and a run history that's impossible to parse when record 112 fails silently because Folk already had that email under a slightly different format.
You probably just need those contacts in Folk. You probably don't have the afternoon to learn Power Automate's Folk connector, and you shouldn't need to. So you escalate it to IT or whoever manages automations, and now it's in a queue with seven other requests.
Once you need to filter by source, deduplicate against what's already in Folk, or handle conditional logic per row, you've crossed into custom-code territory that Power Automate wasn't built for.
Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons
Until recently, the most repeatable option for spreadsheet ↔ Folk workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings and reuse them as saved templates. You picked your range, tagged your fields, saved the config, ran the import.
That was genuinely useful. Consistent output, reusable configs, no reformatting every run.
But you were still doing the mapping. You specified which column went to which Folk field. You wrote the filter logic. You handled what happened when a column got renamed between runs. The add-on moved the data; the thinking was still yours. And when your workbook structure changed — a new column added, a header renamed for clarity — the template broke until someone fixed it.
This is the previous generation. It reduced the work. It didn't remove the decisions.
The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel
There is a different way to think about this. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Folk integration it can push records into Folk or pull them back out based on what you ask. No template to maintain. No automation to debug. You describe the task.
Example 1: Import a target account list into Folk
Create a Folk company record for every row in my "Target Accounts" sheet using column A for company name, column B for industry, and column C for website — skip any row where column A is blank
Every valid row becomes a Folk company record. Blank company names are skipped, not dropped silently. You get a count of what was created and what was bypassed.
Example 2: Export Folk contacts into the workbook for dedup review
Export all my Folk contacts into a new worksheet called "CRM Export" with columns for first name, last name, email, company, and Folk contact ID
The pattern: you're not running an export and then deciding what to do with it. You're describing the output directly, and SheetXAI handles the Folk API call and the worksheet write in one step.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with contact data or a Folk export, then ask it to push or pull what you need. The Folk integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.
More Folk + Excel guides
Bulk Import Contacts Into Folk From a Google Sheet
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Export Folk Contacts to a Google Sheet for a CRM Audit
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Bulk Create Company Records in Folk From a Google Sheet
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Export Folk Notes to a Google Sheet for a Quarterly Review
Pull all relationship notes from Folk into a Google Sheet with contact name, note body, and date so your team can review them before the QBR.
Add Meeting Notes in Bulk to Folk Contacts From a Google Sheet
Log post-call summaries from a Google Sheet directly as notes on the right Folk contacts, matched by email.
Bulk Update Folk Contact Fields From a Google Sheet
Push enriched data from a Google Sheet back into Folk to update job titles, companies, and phone numbers across hundreds of records at once.
Export and Re-Import Folk Companies for a Round-Trip Enrichment in a Google Sheet
Export all Folk companies to a Google Sheet, enrich them with external data, then push the updated records back into Folk in one pass.