The Scenario
Your consulting firm just finished scoping a competitive intelligence project. There are 50 company names sitting in column A of an Excel workbook — one per row, each accompanied by a brief research instruction in column B. Your job is to get a Manus agent task running for each one, and to capture the returned task IDs in column C so you can check on them later.
You know what happens if you do this by hand.
The bad version:
- Open Manus, create a task, paste the row A text as the prompt, copy the task ID, switch back to the workbook, paste it into column C, move to row two, repeat — fifty times.
- Lose track of which ID corresponds to which company around row eighteen when you accidentally paste the wrong task ID into the wrong row.
- Spend twenty minutes at the end cross-checking columns A and C to figure out what went wrong, then redo the mismatched rows.
This batch needs to be running before the client call at two o'clock. You don't have two hours to spend on tab-switching.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the data, connects to Manus on your behalf, creates each task, and writes the returned IDs back into the workbook — without you leaving the workbook at all.
For each of the 50 rows in column A of this Excel workbook, create a Manus task with that row's text as the instruction, write the task ID to column B, and mark column C as 'created'
What You Get
- A Manus task created for each row, with the prompt drawn directly from column A.
- The returned task ID written into column B for every row as soon as each request completes.
- Column C marked 'created' to confirm each row processed, with any failures noted instead.
- Any rows that fail (rate limit, empty cell, API error) are flagged so you know what to retry.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The company names have extra whitespace or trailing commas
Create a Manus task for each row in column A — strip any leading/trailing whitespace or trailing commas from the text before using it as the task prompt, and write the returned task IDs into column B
Column A has some blank rows I want to skip
For each non-empty row in column A of this workbook, create a Manus task using that row's text as the prompt, skip blank rows entirely, and write the task ID into column B only for rows where a task was created
I need to combine columns A and B into the task prompt
For each row in this workbook, create a Manus task whose prompt is the company name from column A followed by a colon and the research brief from column B — write the returned task ID into column C
I also want to timestamp each task creation in column D
Create a Manus task for each row using column A as the prompt, write the task ID into column B, and stamp the current date and time into column D for every row that succeeds — then summarize how many tasks were created and how many failed
The pattern: pile the cleanup and the action into a single ask. SheetXAI handles the conditional logic so you don't have to pre-process the workbook before running.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of research briefs or task prompts in column A, then ask it to spin up Manus tasks and capture the IDs. You can link to the export task results spoke once the tasks complete, or go back to the Manus hub overview.