How to Connect People Data Labs to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of People Data Labs

You have an Excel workbook full of data — raw contacts from a badge scanner, company names from a pipeline export, survey responses with freeform titles. You need PDL to enrich it, or you need to pull a fresh prospect list out of PDL into that workbook, without spending an afternoon on it.

People Data Labs is good at resolving partial identity signals into complete, structured profiles. But moving data between PDL and Excel is more friction than the task deserves. The default flow is: export to CSV, write or run a script against the API, import the results, fix the column alignment.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Export and Re-Import

The default for Excel is the CSV round-trip. You export your target rows, run them through PDL via the API or UI, get the enriched CSV back, and merge it back into the workbook. For a handful of rows, manageable.

For 400 rows, you're doing data surgery. The merge breaks on column order mismatches. You lose your formulas. Rows that PDL couldn't match disappear silently. And when your manager asks you to re-run next week with an updated list, you're doing the whole cycle again from scratch.

The part that grinds people down isn't any single step — it's the accumulation of small fixes each time you run it.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has People Data Labs connector options. You can set a trigger on a new row in an Excel Online table, call PDL, and write the enriched data back into the worksheet.

Quick check — are you comfortable with Power Automate flows? Do you know how to configure a custom connector, handle JSON responses, and map dynamic content back into a table column? If those phrases mean nothing to you, skip to Method 3 or 4.

For those who are still here, the flow does work when properly configured. You set the trigger on your Excel Online table, wire up the PDL API call, handle the response fields, map them to your table columns, and add error-handling for no-match rows.

The problem is scope.

Power Automate fires one record at a time. Enriching 500 contacts means 500 flow runs, 500 API calls, and a run history that becomes unreadable the moment a batch of rows returns unexpected fields and the flow partially fails.

You probably just need the enriched firmographics to finish the territory plan before Friday. You probably have no idea how to configure a custom connector with dynamic field mapping in Power Automate — and honestly, that shouldn't be part of your job. So you ask the operations person to build it, and you're waiting two days for a flow that may not handle null responses the way you need.

And once you need to join the enriched results with another worksheet or apply conditional logic about which rows to include, you've moved outside what the automation can handle natively.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best repeatable option was a category of Excel add-ins that let you configure column mappings and run enrichment jobs from a task pane. You mapped your input fields, set the PDL enrichment type, saved the config, and ran it against a selected range.

That was a meaningful improvement over the CSV round-trip. Configs were reusable, output was consistent, and you didn't have to touch the API console.

But the thinking stayed on you. The field mapping, the conditional logic, the handling of no-match rows, the fix every time a column moved. The add-in got the data through; the operator still had to architect the run. And if you wanted a different enrichment type next month, you were back in the configuration panel.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked more from the person running it than a data enrichment job should.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in People Data Labs integration it can enrich your records, run searches, clean your data, and write results back — from a single prompt.

Example 1: Enrich a company list with firmographics

Enrich all companies in this workbook using PDL bulk enrichment in batches of 100, matching by the website in column B, and write employee count, industry, and LinkedIn URL back into columns C through E.

PDL processes the rows in batches and writes enriched fields back into the correct columns. Rows with no PDL match are flagged so you can review or skip them.

Example 2: Import a prospect search

Use PDL company search to find 200 healthcare technology companies in Germany with more than 50 employees and populate my Excel Accounts sheet with company name, website, employee count, industry, and HQ city.

The pattern: instead of exporting a query result and then merging it, you describe the target and the destination in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the query and the write-back together.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a contact or account list, then ask it to enrich your rows or run a PDL search. The People Data Labs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.