The Scenario
A security review is coming up and the data governance lead has been handed an action item: produce a full list of every Hex collection in the workspace, who has access to each one, and whether the sharing setting is "workspace-wide" or restricted. The concern is that some collections created during rapid growth were shared too broadly and nobody has looked at them since.
There are forty-something collections spread across six teams. The Hex UI shows you one collection at a time. There is no built-in export that gives you a cross-collection view.
The bad version:
- Click through each collection in the Hex UI, open the sharing panel, note the settings and members.
- Open the Excel workbook, type in the collection name, the sharing mode, and each member — one row per collection, by hand.
- Repeat thirty-eight more times.
Nobody has time for thirty-eight manual documentation passes. And the information will be stale before the review meeting if a sharing setting changes in the meantime.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads your workbook and talks to the Hex API to pull collection data — names, descriptions, sharing modes, creators — without you touching the Hex UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this prompt:
List all Hex collections and write their name, description, sharing mode, and creator into columns A through D of my sheet — one collection per row.
SheetXAI calls the Hex API, iterates across all collections, and writes the four fields into your workbook with headers in row 1 and data starting in row 2.
What You Get
- Column A: collection name.
- Column B: description as set in Hex — blank if none was provided.
- Column C: sharing mode as returned by the API — typically workspace, restricted, or private.
- Column D: creator name or email.
- Every collection in the workspace, written in one pass without clicking through the Hex UI.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need per-collection access lists, not just sharing mode
The governance review requires knowing exactly which groups and users have access to each collection — not just the sharing mode label.
Fetch all Hex collections and for each one list the groups and users with access — write a row per collection with collection name, access type, and grantee into my Excel 'Permissions Audit' sheet.
You only want collections that are shared workspace-wide
The security concern is specifically about overly broad sharing. You want to filter the output to only the collections where the sharing mode is workspace-wide.
List all Hex collections and write only those with a workspace-wide sharing mode into my sheet — include name, creator, and creation date.
You need to flag collections with no description
Your documentation standard requires every collection to have a description. You want to identify the ones that are blank so the owners can be contacted.
List all Hex collections and write name, sharing mode, and creator into columns A through C. In column D, write "Missing description" if the description field is empty, otherwise write "OK."
Full audit: pull all collections, flag broad sharing, flag missing descriptions, and note owner in one pass
You want a single audit-ready workbook with every collection, a flag for workspace-wide sharing, a flag for missing descriptions, and the creator email in the last column — sorted so the highest-risk collections (workspace-wide and missing descriptions) appear first.
Fetch all Hex collections. Write name, sharing mode, creator email, and description into columns A through D. In column E, write "Flag — broad sharing" if the sharing mode is workspace-wide. In column F, write "Flag — no description" if description is empty. Sort by column E descending so flagged collections appear first. Write headers in row 1.
The governance lead gets a workbook she can actually work through rather than a raw API dump to interpret.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Excel workbook, then ask it to map your Hex collections and sharing settings for an access review. For a related audit workflow, see Audit Hex Workspace Users and Flag Inactive Accounts or the Hex integration overview.