The Scenario
You are an HR manager at a 120-person company. Annual compensation review is next week. Your VP of HR wants a working spreadsheet — every active employee, their department, job title, hire date, and pay type — by tomorrow morning.
Gusto has all of it. The problem is getting it into Excel in a shape you can actually use.
The slow version:
- Log into Gusto and navigate to employee reports
- Download the default employee export CSV
- Open it in Excel and discover 40 columns you do not need and 3 you do not have
- Delete the irrelevant columns
- Fix the hire date formatting because it came out as a serial number
- Sort by department manually
- Two hours of data prep before the actual compensation review starts.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It connects directly to Gusto and writes the data you asked for, in the shape you asked for, without a CSV in sight.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Export all active Gusto employees to this Excel sheet with columns for employee ID, full name, start date, job title, and salary or hourly rate. Sort by department, then by last name within each department.
SheetXAI calls Gusto, pulls the active employee roster, applies the sort, and writes the results into the workbook. No extra columns. No serial number dates. Sorted exactly as described.
What You Get
A clean roster tab with the columns you specified:
- Employee ID — from Gusto, useful for any downstream system lookups
- Full name — first and last combined or separate, depending on how you ask
- Start date — formatted as a date, not a serial number
- Job title — from the Gusto employee record
- Salary or hourly rate — the current compensation figure
The sort is applied before the data lands. You open the workbook and it is ready to use, not ready to be cleaned.
If you need department added, or if you want only active full-time employees, you say so in the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real company data has edge cases. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When department names are inconsistent
Some employees have "Engineering" and others have "Eng" or "Software Engineering" because of how they were entered at different times.
Export all active Gusto employees to this workbook with full name, department, job title, and start date. Normalize department names — treat "Eng," "Engineering," and "Software Engineering" as "Engineering." Sort by normalized department, then last name.
When you need to flag employees hired in the last 90 days
New hires get a different treatment during compensation review. You want them flagged before anyone touches the data.
Pull all active Gusto employees into this workbook with name, department, job title, start date, and pay type. Add a column called "New Hire Flag" — mark "Yes" for any employee hired in the last 90 days, "No" for everyone else.
When pay type is mixed and you want the groups separated
Some employees are salaried, some are hourly. The review treats them differently, and you want them in separate sections.
Export all active Gusto employees to this workbook. Include name, department, job title, start date, pay type, and compensation rate. Put salaried employees first, then hourly employees, with a header row for each section.
When you also need contractor headcount in the same workbook
The VP of HR wants a single tab showing employees and contractors together for a complete headcount view.
Pull all active Gusto employees into columns A through G with name, email, department, title, start date, pay type, and "Employee" in a Type column. Then pull all active Gusto contractors into the same tab below the last employee row with name, email, type of work, start date, and "Contractor" in the Type column. Add a summary at the top with total employee and contractor counts.
The pattern: instead of running two separate exports and merging them in Excel, you describe the combined view and get it in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any blank workbook, then ask it to pull your Gusto employee roster. The Gusto integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-update compensation in Gusto from an Excel workbook or the Gusto in Excel overview.