The Scenario
You're the data governance lead at a 500-person company and a compliance audit is scheduled for next week. The auditor's first request: a list of every Metabase card and dashboard — name, collection, creator, last modified date — for the past fiscal year. Your Metabase instance has been accumulating content for four years. The search UI is paginated and has no export. You have until Thursday.
The bad version:
- Open Metabase, start scrolling through collections, and manually copy card names, collection paths, creator names, and dates into an Excel workbook.
- Realize that navigating to the last-modified date requires clicking into each card individually, and that there are approximately 400 cards.
- Get 60 rows into the workbook and accept that this approach will not produce a complete audit by Thursday.
The auditor is not going to accept a 60-row sample and a promise to finish later.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It can list every Metabase card and dashboard your user can access — with collection paths, creator names, and timestamps — and write the complete inventory into the workbook in one pass.
List all Metabase cards the current user can access and write each card's ID, name, collection path, creator name, and last updated date into Sheet1, then list all dashboards with the same fields into Sheet2
What You Get
- Sheet1 contains every accessible card: ID, name, full collection path, creator name, last updated date.
- Sheet2 contains every accessible dashboard with the same five columns.
- Both sheets have header rows.
- Nested collection paths are fully resolved — not just the immediate parent folder.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need collection structure first, then content counts
Fetch all Metabase collections, list them in Sheet1 with ID, name, and parent collection path, then for each collection write a count of how many cards and dashboards it contains into columns D and E
The auditor gets the org chart of the Metabase workspace alongside the content volume — useful for identifying orphaned collections.
You want stale content flagged automatically
List all Metabase cards and write ID, name, collection path, creator, and last updated date into Sheet1 — in column F write STALE for any card not updated in the past 365 days, otherwise leave it blank
The STALE column gives the auditor an immediate triage view without a manual date comparison.
You need creator ownership counts
List all Metabase cards and dashboards into Sheet1, then in Sheet2 write one row per creator with their name, card count, and dashboard count, sorted by total count descending
Useful for the governance team to understand who owns the most content and who to contact during cleanup.
Full audit package in one shot
List all Metabase cards in Sheet1 and all dashboards in Sheet2, each with ID, name, collection path, creator, and last updated date. Flag items not updated in 365+ days as STALE in column F. In Sheet3 write a summary: total cards, total dashboards, stale cards count, stale dashboards count, top 5 creators by item count.
Three worksheets, complete audit package, ready for the auditor on Thursday.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook you're using for the compliance audit, then ask it to pull the full Metabase inventory into worksheets. Also useful: pulling revision history for key Metabase dashboards, and the hub overview on connecting Metabase to Excel.