The Scenario
The compliance audit starts Tuesday. Your data governance lead sent a message Friday afternoon: she needs every table in the production BigQuery dataset documented — column names, types, nullable modes, row counts — in a shared Excel workbook by end of Monday. There are forty-something tables. She's never counted them herself.
The bad version:
- Open BigQuery console, navigate to the dataset, click each table name, copy the schema fields, switch back to the workbook, type in the field names and types by hand.
- Repeat for each table. Lose count around table twelve.
- Discover two tables were added last week that aren't in your mental list. Miss them entirely.
Nobody hired you to be a data entry clerk for a schema inventory. But here it is, and Monday morning is not far away.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook and talks to Google BigQuery — and it can list every table in a dataset, fetch each table's schema, and write all of it into your workbook in one structured output.
Fetch the schema for the BigQuery table specified in cell A1 of my Excel sheet and write each field's name, type, mode, and description into columns B through E
What You Get
- One row per field across every table in the dataset.
- Columns: table name, column name, type (STRING, INTEGER, TIMESTAMP, etc.), nullable mode (NULLABLE, REQUIRED, REPEATED).
- Tables are grouped — all fields from one table appear before moving to the next.
- If BigQuery adds a table between now and the audit, running the prompt again refreshes the output.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need row counts per table as well
List all tables in my BigQuery dataset my-project.warehouse, fetch the schema and approximate row count for each, and write table name, column name, type, nullable mode, and row count into my Excel sheet — one row per field.
You only care about a subset of tables
List all tables in my BigQuery dataset my-project.warehouse whose names start with 'orders_', fetch their schemas, and write each field's table name, column name, type, and mode as a row in my Excel sheet.
You want to flag columns with no description
List all tables in my-project.warehouse, fetch their schemas, write all fields into my Excel sheet as table name / column name / type / mode / description rows, and add a column called 'missing_description' — mark TRUE for any field where the description is empty.
Document the dataset, flag nullable conflicts, and sort by table name
List all tables in my-project.warehouse, fetch each schema, write all fields into my Excel sheet as table name / column name / type / mode rows, sort the output by table name ascending, and add a column called 'attention' — mark 'nullable required conflict' for any field where mode is REQUIRED but the type allows nulls, otherwise leave it blank.
One prompt covers the full audit, not just the data pull.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook, then ask it to document every table in your BigQuery dataset before your next compliance review. For pushing data the other direction, see bulk insert rows into BigQuery from an Excel workbook or return to the Google BigQuery integration overview.