The Scenario
You're the BI platform manager and you've been asked to make a case to leadership for which Metabase dashboards to prioritize for maintenance this quarter. The ask sounds simple: show which reports people actually use. But Metabase's native "popular items" widget shows five items, can't be exported, and has no date dimension. Your recently viewed history shows what you personally opened — not what the team uses. You need a structured view of both, in a workbook you can share.
The bad version:
- Screenshot the Metabase popular items widget and paste it into a slide.
- Click through your recent history in Metabase one item at a time, noting names and dates into an Excel workbook.
- Present the five popular items and 12 recent items to leadership without timestamps, without collection context, and without any ability to answer follow-up questions from the data.
The presentation goes fine. Next quarter, when someone asks whether the dashboards you maintained were actually the right ones to prioritize, you won't have the data to answer.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It can pull both the popular items list and your recent activity log from Metabase and write them into separate worksheets, timestamped and sortable.
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and my 20 most recently viewed items, then write them into Sheet1 labeled Popular and Sheet2 labeled Recent, each with columns for name, type, collection, and timestamp
What You Get
- Sheet1 (Popular): up to 5 items Metabase identifies as most viewed, with name, type, collection path, and the popularity signal Metabase exposes.
- Sheet2 (Recent): your 20 most recently viewed items, sorted by timestamp descending.
- Both worksheets have header rows.
- The data is live — not a screenshot from last month.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want recent views with the oldest first to identify neglected content
Get my Metabase recent views and write each item's name, type, collection, and last viewed timestamp into this workbook sorted by timestamp ascending
The content you haven't opened in the longest time surfaces at the top — archive candidates without manual scanning.
You want to cross-reference popular items against an existing inventory
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and write their IDs, names, types, and collections into Sheet1. Check whether each item ID appears in the inventory list in column A of Sheet2 and write YES or NO in column E.
Useful when you've already run the workspace inventory audit and you want to confirm the popular items are documented.
You want a single prioritized list
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and my 20 most recently viewed items. Write all unique items into Sheet1 with name, type, collection, and source labeled as Popular, Recent, or Both — deduplicate items that appear in both lists
Items appearing in both lists get the "Both" label and rise to the top of the maintenance queue naturally.
Full usage audit with summary in one shot
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and my 20 most recently viewed items. Write popular items into Sheet1 and recent into Sheet2 with name, type, collection, and timestamp. In Sheet3 write a summary: total unique items, count by type, and any items appearing in both lists.
Three worksheets, a usage picture leadership can act on.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook you're using for the quarterly maintenance planning, then ask it to pull your Metabase usage data before the meeting. Also useful: auditing your full Metabase workspace inventory, and the hub overview on connecting Metabase to Excel.