The Scenario
You ran a batch of fifty Manus research tasks yesterday. This morning you open the Excel workbook with column A full of task IDs and column B completely empty. The tasks should be done by now — most of them, anyway. The content team lead wants a summary of what each agent produced before the eleven o'clock stand-up.
You could open Manus, find each task by ID, read the output, switch back to the workbook, paste it in, and move on to the next one.
The bad version:
- Search for the first task ID in the Manus task list, click into it, copy the output message, switch to the workbook, paste into column B, go back, search for the next ID.
- Discover that eight tasks are still pending — paste "pending" into those cells manually, flag them somewhere separate for a retry.
- Spend forty minutes on data entry when the meeting is in forty-five.
The stand-up is not going to wait, and the content team lead didn't ask for a status update on your copy-paste speed.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the task IDs from column A, queries the Manus API for each one, and writes the results back into the columns you specify — handling the pending cases inline.
Check every Manus task ID in column A of this Excel workbook and fill column B with the result text — for any tasks not yet done, write 'pending' in column B and mark column C as 'retry'
What You Get
- The output message from each completed task written into column B.
- "pending" written into column B for any task that hasn't finished yet.
- Column C marked 'retry' for those pending rows so you know which IDs to check again later.
- API errors surface as descriptive notes in column B rather than blanks.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some task IDs in column A are duplicates — I only want to fetch each once
For each unique task ID in column A, fetch the Manus task details and write the status into column B and the output into column C — skip duplicate IDs, leaving those rows blank in columns B and C
I want to separate short outputs from long ones
Fetch Manus task results for each ID in column A, write the output into column C, and add a column D label: 'short' if the output is under 200 characters, 'long' if it's 200 or more
Some tasks ran against the wrong prompt — I want to flag those
For each task ID in column A, fetch the Manus output into column B, then check if the word 'error' or 'failed' appears anywhere in that output — if it does, mark column C as 'review'
Pull results, clean the output text, and summarize across all rows
Fetch all Manus task results for the IDs in column A, trim any leading/trailing whitespace from each output message before writing it into column B, then add a row at the bottom of the workbook with a count of completed tasks, pending tasks, and stopped tasks
The one-prompt approach handles the entire sweep — fetch, transform, and aggregate — so the summary is ready before you walk into the stand-up.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of Manus task IDs, then ask it to pull the results and statuses in one pass. For the upstream step, see bulk-creating tasks from an Excel workbook, or go back to the Manus hub overview.