The Scenario
You are a last-mile delivery coordinator. It is 7:30 AM and the driver leaves at 8:15 AM. Tomorrow's route has 15 stops in an Excel workbook, addresses in column B. Columns C and D are blank.
Your current process is handing the driver a printed list and letting him sequence it in his head. Last week that cost 40 minutes of extra driving.
The bad version of this morning:
- You open a mapping app and manually drag stops into order
- The app does not save the sequence back to the workbook
- You write the order down by hand and type it into column C
- You estimate arrival times by feel
- The driver leaves with a sequence that is still not optimal and arrival times you made up.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads your stop list, geocodes it, calls HERE Waypoint Sequence to find the optimal route, and writes the results back.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Geocode all addresses in column B, then use HERE Waypoint Sequence to find the optimal visit order starting from the depot address in cell A1. Write the optimized sequence number (1–15) to column C and the estimated arrival time for each stop to column D.
SheetXAI geocodes each stop, sends the full set to HERE for sequence optimization, and writes both the visit order and arrival times back.
What You Get
An optimized route, in the workbook, before the driver walks in:
- Column C — optimal visit sequence number for each stop (1 through 15)
- Column D — estimated arrival time at each stop
Sorting column C ascending gives the driver a sequenced itinerary. The order minimizes total drive time, not just total distance.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real stop lists have address quality issues and operational constraints. SheetXAI handles them in the route optimization prompt.
When some stops have priority delivery windows
Certain stops must be visited before 10 AM. Column E has "Priority" for those rows.
Geocode all addresses in column B. Use HERE Waypoint Sequence to find the optimal route from the depot in cell A1, treating all rows where column E equals "Priority" as must-visit-first stops. Write the sequence number to column C and estimated arrival to column D.
When two stops share the same building
You have multiple deliveries to the same address.
Identify duplicate addresses in column B and merge them into a single stop for the routing call. Run HERE Waypoint Sequence from the depot in cell A1, write the optimized sequence to column C, and for any merged stops write the same sequence number to all matching rows.
When you want the route sorted and written back automatically
You want the rows reordered by visit sequence so the driver does not have to sort in the workbook.
Geocode addresses in column B, run HERE Waypoint Sequence from the depot in cell A1, then sort all rows by the optimized sequence and write the resulting sorted workbook with sequence numbers in column C and arrival times in column D.
When you need geocoding, optimization, and distance totals in one pass
You want the optimal route, arrival times, and a summary row with total distance and total time.
Geocode all 15 addresses in column B using HERE. Run HERE Waypoint Sequence from the depot in cell A1 to find the optimal visit order. Write sequence numbers to column C and estimated arrival times to column D. Then add a summary row at the bottom showing total route distance in kilometers and total estimated drive time in minutes.
The pattern: geocoding, sequencing, and summary in one prompt, so the workbook is complete and annotated before the driver arrives.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with delivery stop addresses, then ask it to optimize the route using HERE. The HERE integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to calculate drive times from a fixed origin or the HERE in Excel overview.