The Scenario
You're a campaign coordinator and the regional campaign brief is finalized: forty markets, forty landing pages, forty mailers going to print in six days. Each landing page URL needs to be shortened before it goes on the printed piece — Lob short links so you can track scan-to-click rates per region.
The URLs are already in your Excel workbook: column A, one per row. You need short URLs in column B, and you need them before the design team files the artwork.
The bad version:
- Open Lob's dashboard, navigate to the links section, paste the first URL, configure the custom domain, copy the short URL, go back to the workbook, paste it in column B
- Repeat for all forty URLs
- Discover that three of your URLs had trailing spaces from the CRM export and Lob rejected them — now you need to figure out which rows those were
The design team's deadline isn't flexible. Artwork submission is at 5 PM. It's 2 PM and you have thirty-seven URLs left to process.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the URL column, calls Lob's link-creation API for each row, and writes the short URL back into column B — in one pass, without you touching the Lob dashboard.
Take all 40 campaign URLs in column A, shorten them using Lob with my custom domain, and write the short URL and link ID into columns B and C.
What You Get
- Column B filled with the Lob short URL for each row
- Column C filled with the Lob link ID for each short URL, so you can reference or update the links later
- Any rows where Lob returned an error written with the error message in column B instead of silently skipped
- The original long URLs in column A unchanged
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some URLs have trailing spaces or malformed query strings
Before creating short links, strip trailing whitespace and fix any URLs in column A that are missing the "https://" prefix, then shorten each cleaned URL using Lob with my custom domain and write the short URL into column B and the link ID into column C.
The workbook has a mix of URLs that already have short links and new ones that don't
For rows where column B is empty, shorten the URL in column A using Lob with my custom domain and write the short URL into column B and the link ID into column C. Skip any rows where column B already contains a value.
Each URL needs to be tagged with a campaign name that lives in column D
For each row in columns A and D, create a Lob short link for the URL in column A and include the campaign name from column D as a metadata tag, then write the short URL into column B and the link ID into column C.
I need a confirmation report after all links are created
Shorten all URLs in column A using Lob with my custom domain, write the short URL into column B and the link ID into column C, then write a summary in cell E1 showing how many links were created successfully and how many failed.
Ask for the cleanup and the creation in a single prompt — SheetXAI handles both in sequence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the workbook where your campaign landing page URLs live, then ask it to bulk-create Lob short links and write the results back before your print deadline. See also the spoke on bulk-updating Lob short link destinations and the full Lob integration overview.