The Scenario
You're managing the pre-send checklist for an email campaign going out Thursday to 5,000 contacts. The list came from a CRM export — first name in column B, email in column D, but the "Salutation" column is completely blank. The ESP requires a salutation field before it will render personalized greetings, and your copy has "Dear {{salutation}} {{last_name}}" baked into every email.
The bad version:
- Open the Gender API docs, copy the endpoint URL, write a script to loop through 5,000 rows one at a time, and wait through rate-limiting pauses.
- Parse the JSON response for each row, decide your confidence threshold, add conditional logic to write "Unknown" instead of a wrong salutation.
- Paste the results back into the workbook column by column, discover the columns shifted, realign everything, and run the whole thing again for the 200 rows where the name had special characters.
This isn't really "data prep." It's a small engineering project dropped on someone who's supposed to be finishing campaign copy.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the data, understands your column layout, and talks to Gender API on your behalf — no API credentials to configure, no script to maintain. Open the sidebar and describe the task.
For every row in this workbook where column I is blank, call Gender API using the first name in column B. Write the gender result to column I and the confidence score to column J. Then write "Mr." to column K if gender is male and confidence is 75 or above, "Ms." if female and confidence is 75 or above, and "Unknown" for anything else.
What You Get
- Column I filled with "male," "female," or "unknown" for every previously blank row.
- Column J filled with the numeric confidence score (0–100) returned by Gender API.
- Column K filled with the salutation: "Mr.," "Ms.," or "Unknown" — nothing else, nothing inconsistent.
- Rows that already had a value in column I are untouched.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some rows have a full name in column B instead of just a first name
For every row in this workbook where column I is blank, call Gender API using only the first word from column B as the first name input. Write gender to column I and confidence to column J.
The name column has entries like "dr. sarah" or "JOHN" with irregular casing
Before calling Gender API, clean the first name in column B: strip leading titles (Dr., Prof., Mr., Ms.), trim whitespace, and convert to title case. Then call Gender API with the cleaned name for each row. Write the cleaned name to column B, gender to column I, and confidence to column J.
The campaign list is split across three worksheets — "US," "EU," and "APAC" — and each needs gender enrichment
For every row across the 'US,' 'EU,' and 'APAC' worksheets where column I is blank, call Gender API using the first name in column B. Write gender and confidence back to columns I and J on the same worksheet as the source row.
The salutation column needs to be ready for the ESP, the confidence scores need to be hidden from the export, and about 300 rows have no first name at all
For every row in this workbook: if column B is blank but column D has an email, call Gender API using the email. If column B has a name, call Gender API using the first name. Write gender to column I, confidence to column J, and the salutation ("Mr." / "Ms." / "Unknown" for confidence below 70%) to column K. For rows where both B and D are blank, write "Unknown" to column K and leave I and J empty.
That last prompt handles the cleanup, the fallback logic, and the salutation assignment in one shot — no pre-filtering step, no separate pass for email-only rows.
Try It
Open an Excel workbook with your contact list and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI. Ask it to enrich column B with Gender API and populate your salutation column — exactly the way the campaign needs it. Or see the related spoke on enriching with country of origin and the hub overview.