The Scenario
A field service operations manager has an Excel workbook with two worksheets: one with five technician home addresses, one with twenty customer job sites. Quarterly scheduling is happening this week. The question on the table: which technician should be assigned to which site based on driving time? The manager needs a full 5x20 matrix before the scheduling meeting on Thursday.
The bad version:
- Open Google Maps, enter technician 1's address, add job site 1 as destination, note the driving time, type it into the matrix cell. That is one of 100 combinations.
- After 30 lookups the numbers start blurring. Did you do technician 2 to site 11, or technician 3 to site 11? The cell references look plausible either way.
- Three hours later the matrix has 73 values in it. Seven cells are blank because you got interrupted and lost your place. The scheduling meeting is tomorrow at 9 AM.
Nobody scheduled this meeting to review a 93%-complete matrix. The missing cells are exactly the assignments someone will ask about.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the coordinates across both worksheets, calls Radar's route matrix API once, and writes the complete 5x20 grid into the workbook. All 100 pairs, no gaps.
Build a driving-distance matrix in this workbook using Radar: origins are rows 2-6 of Sheet2 (lat in A, lng in B), destinations are rows 2-21 of Sheet3 (lat in A, lng in B) — fill the matrix with travel times in minutes in Sheet1
What You Get
- Sheet1 populated with a 5x20 grid of driving times in minutes
- Row and column headers corresponding to technician and site identifiers
- The minimum value in each column identifies the nearest technician immediately — no additional analysis needed before the meeting
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Technician and site addresses are in address format, not coordinates
For each technician address in Sheet2 column A (rows 2-6), geocode via Radar to get lat/lng. For each site address in Sheet3 column A (rows 2-21), geocode via Radar to get lat/lng. Then build the full driving-time matrix and write it to Sheet1 in minutes.
You need both time and distance in the matrix
Build the Radar driving-time matrix using Sheet2 technicians (lat A, lng B, rows 2-6) and Sheet3 sites (lat A, lng B, rows 2-21) — write two grids side by side in Sheet1: driving time in minutes starting at B2, and driving distance in kilometers starting at B10
Some sites are flagged as inactive and should be excluded
Filter Sheet3 to only include rows where column C is not "Inactive", then build the Radar driving-time matrix against all 5 technicians in Sheet2 and write the result into Sheet1
Build the matrix, identify the nearest technician per site, and draft an assignment column in one pass
Build the full Radar driving-time matrix (Sheet2 technicians as origins, Sheet3 sites as destinations), write the grid to Sheet1, then add a column to Sheet3 showing the technician name with the shortest drive time for each site and the corresponding minutes
That last step turns the matrix into a draft schedule without a separate analysis pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with origin and destination coordinates across worksheets — ask it to build a Radar driving-time matrix and write the full grid into the workbook. For point-to-point distances, see bulk driving distance calculations, or return to the Radar integration overview.