How to Connect IQAir AirVisual to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of IQAir AirVisual

You have an Excel workbook full of city names, GPS coordinates, or facility locations. You need current AQI readings, pollution breakdowns, and weather conditions pulled from IQAir AirVisual and landed in the right columns — before a client call, a compliance deadline, or a team review that is happening in a few hours.

IQAir AirVisual is good at delivering real-time and historical air quality data for thousands of cities worldwide. But bridging that data into your workbook requires you to either work through their API or export and reformat by hand — and neither option scales once you have more than a handful of locations.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default workflow. You open IQAir's web interface, search each city one at a time, read the AQI off the screen, and type it into your workbook. For Excel users, the more common variation is to download a CSV from IQAir where available, reshape it, and paste the columns you actually need over the ones already in the workbook.

For sixty cities this is an hour of reformatting with no audit trail. AQI is live data — by the time you finish pasting city 60, city 1 has updated. Your workbook is a collection of different moments, not a coherent dataset.

If you do this quarterly for one report, fine. If the list grows or the cadence increases, the cumulative time cost becomes hard to justify once you start tracking it.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate can hit the IQAir API and write results into an Excel workbook stored in SharePoint or OneDrive. You set up a scheduled flow, call the AirVisual endpoint for each location row, parse the response, and map the fields back.

Before committing to that path — do you know what a flow trigger is? An HTTP action? JSON parsing in Power Automate? If those feel unfamiliar, this is not the right method. Skip to Method 3 or 4 and save yourself two days of tab-hunting.

If you are still here: the flow works. The structural problem is that Power Automate processes one row at a time. A hundred locations means a hundred HTTP calls inside a loop, and when row 47 comes back with a rate-limit error, the rest of the loop keeps running and you have a partial update with no obvious indicator of where it stopped.

You probably just need the pollution data for your location list. You probably have no idea how to parse a nested JSON response in Power Automate — and you should not have to. So this ends up on the desk of the IT person who built the last few flows, and now you are waiting on their backlog.

Once you add error handling, conditional logic, and threshold flags to the flow, the maintenance surface grows fast.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the most reliable repeatable option was a category of add-ons that let you set up column mappings, save templates, and run them against the API on demand. You picked your input range, tagged your fields, saved the config, and ran it.

That was a real improvement over manual exports. Output was consistent, the team did not have to reformat every cycle, and configs could be shared.

But you were still responsible for every field mapping. You still had to decide what happened when a city had no matching IQAir data. You still had to rebuild the config after a column rename. The tool handled transport — the decisions were still entirely yours.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of whoever owned the template.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different approach. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in IQAir AirVisual integration it can pull air quality, weather, and pollution data for your location list without any mapping configuration.

Example 1: Bulk AQI pull for a city list

I have 40 cities in column A of my Excel workbook with states in B and countries in C. Pull the current AQI and PM2.5 for each from AirVisual and fill columns D and E.

SheetXAI reads each row, calls IQAir for each location, and writes back the fields. Rows with no matching data come back flagged in a status column rather than silently empty.

Example 2: Dual-scale compliance table

I have 25 manufacturing sites across the US, China, and India in my Facilities sheet. Pull the current US and CN AQI and main pollutant for each city and add them in new columns next to each site.

The pattern: instead of pulling the data and separately reformatting for compliance, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the multi-scale logic inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a location or facility list, then ask it to pull the AQI data you need. The IQAir AirVisual integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.