How to Connect Perigon to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Perigon

You have an Excel workbook full of data — brand keywords to monitor, a journalist press list, a directory of company names from your CRM. You need that data matched against Perigon's news index, or you need Perigon's article results pulled back into structured rows.

Perigon is good at surfacing structured news intelligence: article metadata, story clusters, journalist profiles, source directories, and semantic search across news and Wikipedia. But getting that data into an Excel workbook and keeping it current takes more effort than it should. The default move is to export a CSV from the Perigon dashboard, clean up the columns, import into Excel, then repeat every time someone asks for a refresh.

Below are the four common ways teams approach this. Only the last one holds up at scale.

Method 1: CSV Export and Import

Open Perigon, run your query, export results as CSV. Open Excel. Import the file using the data import wizard. Realign the column headers. Strip out the fields you don't need. Format the dates. Save.

If you do this once, it's annoying but manageable. If you do it weekly as part of a competitive monitoring workflow, each cycle costs you 20 to 40 minutes before you've done a single minute of actual analysis.

The friction compounds when the list of keywords you're tracking changes. Every new competitor or topic means a new export, a new import, a new round of column formatting. The data is always a few days old by the time it reaches the people who need it.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate can connect to Perigon via HTTP action and write results to an Excel workbook stored in OneDrive or SharePoint. You configure a scheduled flow, call the Perigon endpoint, parse the JSON response, and map each field to the right column in your table.

Before you invest time in this — are you comfortable with HTTP connectors? Do you know how to parse a JSON array in Power Automate? Have you worked with dynamic schema expressions before? If any of those questions give you pause, this path will cost more time than it saves. Skip to Method 4.

If you're still reading: the flow works when it's built correctly. The problem is that one article returned from Perigon means one row added to your workbook — which means one iteration of the Apply to Each loop. For a query returning 200 articles, that's 200 loop iterations, and Power Automate's run history becomes a wall of entries to debug the next time something fails.

You probably just need this week's coverage in a clean workbook. You probably have no idea how to write a JSON schema expression for a nested Perigon response object — and you shouldn't have to. So the request lands with whoever on your team handles Power Automate, and you're waiting for a Slack reply while the report deadline creeps forward.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the standard approach for repeatable news API pulls into Excel was a category of add-ons that let you configure saved query templates — set the endpoint, map the columns, save the config, run it on demand.

That was a genuine step forward from manual CSV imports. Configs were reusable. Output structure was consistent. The team didn't have to reformat every run.

But the template owner was still responsible for every parameter decision — which endpoint, which date range, which fields to include, which keywords to track. The add-on moved the data; the judgment stayed with you. When Perigon changed a field name or you added a new topic to monitor, the config broke until someone went back in and repaired it.

This is the previous generation. It reduced effort. It didn't remove it.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different approach. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Perigon integration it can search for news articles, pull story clusters, enrich journalist names, and write results back into your workbook — for you. No template configuration. No endpoint wiring. No column reformatting.

Example 1: Pull news coverage from keywords in your workbook

Pull news articles from Perigon for the keywords in cells A1:A5 of my Excel sheet, filtered to the last 14 days, and populate a News Feed sheet with title, source name, published date, sentiment, and article URL.

Each matching article lands as a new row in the News Feed sheet. Columns filled automatically from the Perigon response.

Example 2: Enrich a journalist list from a press worksheet

Enrich every journalist in my Excel Press List table by looking up their name column in Perigon and populating the Twitter Handle, Bio, and Location columns.

The pattern: instead of running separate lookups and then pasting results back by hand, you ask for enrichment and writeback in one instruction. SheetXAI handles the per-row calls inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with brand keywords, competitor names, or a journalist list, then ask it to pull the corresponding Perigon data. The Perigon integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.