The Scenario
The retail expansion team has been building a shortlist of 50 candidate store locations for three months. The coordinates are in an Excel workbook. Now the head of real estate wants to know, for each site, how many restaurants, parking facilities, and competitor stores sit within 500 meters — before the board presentation on Thursday. Nobody on the team has touched a places API before.
The bad version:
- Open Geoapify's Places API documentation, figure out the right category codes for restaurants and parking, write a script that loops through 50 coordinate rows and fires a separate API call for each category per location.
- Parse the JSON responses, extract the count and the nearest place name, and paste them into three separate columns — for each of 50 rows.
- Realize the competitor store category is not matching correctly, go back to the docs, update the category filter, re-run, and reconcile the new output with the existing columns.
Thursday is two days away. The board deck is already half-built and the real estate summary slide is the one section still blank.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that runs inside your Excel workbook. It reads the coordinates, calls Geoapify's places search API with the categories you specify, and writes the counts and nearest names back into the correct columns.
Use Geoapify places search to find competitor retail stores within 1km of each location in the Candidates sheet — write the count and names of the top 3 nearest competitors into columns E, F, and G
What You Get
- Column E receives the count of competitor stores within 1km of each candidate location.
- Column F receives the name of the nearest competitor.
- Column G receives the names of the second and third nearest competitors as a comma-separated list.
- Rows with zero competitors within range show a count of zero rather than a blank.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The coordinates are in a different worksheet and the candidate metadata is in another
Use the lat/lon pairs in the Coordinates worksheet to run a Geoapify places search for restaurants within 500m of each row — write the count and nearest place name back into columns E and F of the Candidates worksheet, matching on the location ID in column A
The radius should vary by location based on a column in the workbook
For each row in this workbook, run a Geoapify places search for parking facilities within the radius specified in column D — write the count into column E and the nearest facility name into column F
The search should cover multiple categories and return separate counts for each
For each lat/lon in this workbook, use Geoapify places search to find (1) restaurants within 500m and (2) competitor retail stores within 1km — write the restaurant count into column E, the competitor count into column F, and the nearest competitor name into column G
Run a full site-quality score: nearby amenities, competitor density, and transit access in one pass
For each candidate location in this workbook, use Geoapify to count restaurants within 300m, parking facilities within 500m, and public transit stops within 800m — write each count into columns E, F, and G, then add a composite score in column H that averages the three normalized counts
One instruction covers the multi-category search, the scoring, and the column layout together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of candidate sites, event venues, or delivery zones — then ask it to find what is nearby. See the related spoke on computing travel time between locations, or return to the Geoapify hub.