How to Connect Planly to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Planly

You have an Excel workbook full of scheduled post data — captions, channel names, publish dates, asset URLs. You need it pushed into Planly for scheduling, or pulled back out after a campaign ends, in a way that doesn't involve a full afternoon of tab-switching and manual data cleanup every single time.

Planly is good at managing social media publishing across multiple platforms and teams. But the path between your Excel workbook and Planly's content calendar is almost entirely manual. The usual flow involves exporting a CSV if Planly offers it, massaging the columns to match your workbook's format, then re-importing or manually recreating posts on the other side.

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

Method 1: CSV Export and Reformat

The default for Excel users. You export what you can from Planly — if a CSV export exists — open it in Excel, and spend time reformatting: fixing date formats, splitting channel fields, deleting columns you don't need, adding ones that were missing. For client review docs, this means rebuilding the clean version from scratch every week.

For media library audits, it's entirely manual. You open Planly's media interface, record file names and types by hand, scroll through upload dates — none of which exports cleanly — and type it all into your workbook row by row.

The first time you do it, it takes an hour. The tenth time, you're doing it on autopilot at 9pm on a Thursday and wondering how it became part of your job.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has Planly connector support or you can build against the Planly API through an HTTP action. The idea: schedule a flow, pull the relevant posts, write each one back to your Excel workbook in OneDrive or SharePoint.

Quick question before you go further — do you know what an HTTP action is? A connection reference? Have you authenticated an API from inside Power Automate before? Have you written a JSON expression to extract a nested field? If any of those felt unfamiliar, this probably isn't the right path for you. Method 4 will get you there faster.

If you're still here: setting this up means authenticating the Planly API, picking the right trigger, handling pagination, mapping every field to a column, and debugging the flow when it silently drops a row at step 3.

Once it runs, it runs one item at a time.

Aggregation, filtering across teams, conditional flagging — none of that happens inside the flow without a lot of extra steps. You'd be wiring conditions and expressions for every edge case.

You probably just need the content calendar exported to your workbook. You probably have no idea how to write a Power Automate expression that handles paginated API responses. So you push it to your IT admin, and now you're waiting for a ticket to come back to you — possibly next week.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable workbook ↔ Planly workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings and save templates. You'd define your range, tag your fields, save a config, and run it.

That was a genuine step forward from manual CSV imports. Configs were reusable, the output was consistent, the team didn't have to redo the mapping every run.

But you were still responsible for every decision: which fields to pull, how to handle a missing caption, what to do when Planly's schema changed. The tool moved the data. The thinking was still on you. And when a new team was added to your Planly account or a column got renamed in the API response, the config broke silently until someone noticed the workbook looked wrong.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

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 the structure you're working with, and through its built-in Planly integration it can push to or pull from Planly on request. No template configuration, no automation plumbing, no manual field mapping. You just ask.

Example 1: Export this week's scheduled posts for client review

Fetch all upcoming scheduled posts from Planly and write them to this Excel sheet — one row per post, including scheduled date, platform, channel name, and post text

Each post lands as its own row. If a post is missing a caption, the cell says so — it doesn't silently skip the row.

Example 2: Cross-team channel audit in one pass

Pull every connected Planly channel across all teams and write team name (A), channel name (B), social network (C), and status (D) into this Excel sheet — flag any non-active channels in column E

The pattern: instead of navigating team by team in the Planly UI, you describe the output you need and SheetXAI handles the iteration, the joins, and the flagging in one prompt.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you're tracking social content or Planly team data, then ask it to do one of the tasks above. The Planly integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.