The Scenario
You're an investor relations analyst at a mid-cap public company. The CFO sent a message at 4:12 PM: earnings came out twenty minutes ago. She wants to know what's hitting the wire — how many headlines are out, which outlets are leading, and whether anything looks problematic.
You have an Excel workbook open. You need the current top headlines mentioning the company's ticker symbol, sorted newest first, right now.
The bad version:
- Go to the News API endpoint and construct a query with the ticker symbol as the keyword, set sortBy to publishedAt
- Call the endpoint, read through the JSON, pick out title, source, description, URL, and publishedAt fields
- Paste them into the workbook in order, formatted consistently, in time to actually answer the CFO's question
Breaking news doesn't wait for you to finish normalizing a JSON response. The moment between the earnings release and the first press round is fifteen minutes at most.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, calls News API's top-headlines endpoint with your keyword, and writes the results sorted newest first — while you're still on Slack.
Fetch the current top headlines from News API that mention "MRDX" and write title, source name, description, URL, and published time into columns A through E sorted newest first
What You Get
- Column A: article headline
- Column B: source name (e.g. "Reuters", "Bloomberg")
- Column C: article description or lede
- Column D: direct article URL
- Column E: published timestamp, newest at the top
- All results from the top-headlines endpoint, filtered to your ticker keyword
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to capture all breaking news, not just top headlines
Pull all News API articles mentioning "MRDX" published in the last 2 hours from the /everything endpoint and write title, source, URL, and published time into columns A through D sorted newest first
Some results are from irrelevant sources (e.g. foreign-language outlets)
Fetch top headlines mentioning "MRDX" from News API, filter to English-language sources only, and write title, source, URL, and published time into columns A through D
You want to flag any headlines containing specific risk keywords
From the headlines now in column A of this workbook, flag any title that contains the words "miss", "loss", "lawsuit", "investigation", or "downgrade" with "REVIEW" in column F
Full event-tracking pipeline in one shot
Fetch all News API top headlines mentioning "MRDX" right now, write title, source, description, URL, and published time into columns A through E sorted newest first, then flag any headline containing "miss", "loss", or "downgrade" in column F with "ALERT"
That flag column is what the CFO is actually asking for. You can have it in ninety seconds.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you track news around a ticker or company name, then ask it to pull the current breaking headlines from News API and populate the workbook sorted by recency. For related workflows, see monitoring specific outlets for brand mentions or pulling competitor coverage. Full overview: News API + Excel.