The Scenario
You run logistics for a small courier company. Every morning a dispatcher pastes the day's twenty delivery stops into column A of an Excel workbook, with the depot address in cell B1. Your job is to produce the optimized run sheet before the van leaves at 7:30 AM. The ops coordinator who used to do this moved to a different role three weeks ago.
The bad version:
- Open Google Maps twenty times, manually estimate the best route, note the sequence, and retype stop addresses in order into a new column.
- Spend thirty minutes on this while the driver waits.
- Miss a stop because you had the sequence wrong and the driver has to backtrack across town.
It is 6:50 AM. The driver is in the parking lot.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the stops, calls Mapbox route optimization, and writes the optimized sequence and arrival times back into the workbook before the van needs to leave.
Take the 20 addresses in column A, geocode them using Mapbox, then use Mapbox route optimization starting and ending at the depot in cell B1 and write the optimized stop sequence number into column C and the estimated arrival time into column D for each row.
What You Get
- Column C with a sequence number from 1 to 20 for each stop in optimal order.
- Column D with estimated arrival time based on 7:30 AM departure.
- Any stop Mapbox cannot geocode gets UNRESOLVED in column C so dispatch can correct it before the driver leaves.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some stops have time windows
Geocode all addresses in column A using Mapbox. The delivery window for each stop is in column B as "HH:MM-HH:MM". Compute the optimized route using Mapbox route optimization respecting the time windows in column B, starting and ending at the depot in cell B1. Write the stop sequence into column C and estimated arrival into column D.
Three stops belong to a separate zone route
Split the stops in column A into two groups based on column E: blank = main route, ZONE B = secondary route. Optimize each group separately using Mapbox starting from the depot in B1. Write the main route sequence into column C and the Zone B sequence into column F, with arrival times in columns D and G.
You want the workbook sorted by drive order rather than showing sequence numbers
Use Mapbox to find the best driving order for all stops in column A, then overwrite column A with the stops sorted by optimal visit order and put travel times between consecutive stops in column B.
Full pipeline: validate addresses, optimize route, flag unresolvable stops, and export a driver summary worksheet
First, check all addresses in column A for obvious formatting issues and flag those in column E as NEEDS REVIEW. Geocode the remaining rows and compute the optimized route starting and ending at B1. Write sequence into column C and arrival time into column D. Create a new worksheet called Driver Sheet with columns: Stop Number, Address, Arrival Time, Notes.
One prompt covers validation, optimization, and driver report creation.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your delivery stop workbook tomorrow morning — paste in the stops and ask SheetXAI to optimize the route through Mapbox before the driver clocks in. The driving-time matrix article covers point-to-point comparisons. The Mapbox hub has every geographic workflow.