The Scenario
A real estate analyst has spent the week building a comparative workbook of 200 commercial property listings. Each row has the property's lat/lng. The sales director asked for one more column before the client presentation: driving distance from each property to a fixed city center point — so the client can filter by commute radius. The presentation is Friday. It is Wednesday afternoon.
The bad version:
- Write a VBA macro to loop over 200 rows, call a distance API for each, and write results back. Realize halfway through the macro that Radar's API requires an authentication header and VBA's HTTP object handles auth differently than expected.
- Try a Power Query approach. The data connector returns the full JSON object and there is no straightforward way to extract the nested distance field without a custom parser.
- Do the first 30 rows manually in Google Maps to show progress. By row 17 notice that driving distance and driving time are both available but only one column was requested — now unsure which one to populate.
It is Thursday morning. The presentation is tomorrow.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the property coordinates, calls Radar's routing API for each row against the fixed destination, and writes the distance and travel time columns without any scripting.
Compute Radar route distances for all 200 rows — origin lat/lng in columns A and B, destination lat/lng in columns C and D — and write driving distance in km and duration in minutes to columns E and F
What You Get
- Column E: driving distance in kilometers from each property to the destination
- Column F: estimated driving time in minutes
- All 200 rows processed in one pass — sortable by commute distance for the client presentation
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The destination is a fixed point rather than per-row coordinates
For each row in this workbook (origin lat in A, lng in B), calculate driving distance and time to the fixed destination (lat 51.5074, lng -0.1278) using Radar and write distance (km) to column C and time (min) to column D
Some rows are missing coordinates
For each row where both column A (lat) and column B (lng) are non-empty: calculate driving distance and time to the fixed destination via Radar and write results to columns C and D — mark rows with missing coordinates as No Data in column C
The client wants distances in miles
Calculate driving distance and time from each property (lat A, lng B) to the fixed destination (lat 51.5074, lng -0.1278) via Radar for all 200 rows — convert distance from km to miles and write to column C, write time in minutes to column D
Validate, calculate distances, and add a commute tier label in one pass
For each of the 200 rows (origin lat A, lng B, destination lat C, lng D): check that all four coordinate fields are populated, compute Radar driving distance and time, write distance (km) to column E and time (min) to column F, then add a label in column G: "Under 15 min", "15-30 min", or "Over 30 min"
That label column gives the client an immediate filter for the presentation.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with origin coordinates — ask it to calculate Radar driving distances to a fixed or per-row destination and write results into the workbook. For routing through multiple sequential stops, see fetching turn-by-turn directions, or return to the Radar integration overview.