How to Connect Shipday to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Shipday

You have an Excel workbook full of delivery data — customer names, drop-off addresses, order items, scheduled delivery windows. You need it pushed into Shipday before the morning dispatch, or pulled back out after the day's runs to understand how the fleet actually performed.

Shipday is good at orchestrating last-mile delivery operations: assigning drivers, tracking orders in real time, and coordinating pickups. But the default path for getting your spreadsheet data into it — or out of it — is a manual grind that doesn't belong in an operations workflow.

The usual flow is: export from Excel to CSV, open Shipday, import the file if the format is exactly right, then go back and fix any rows that failed import. Below are the four ways teams handle this. Only the last one works at volume.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste (or CSV Export)

The default move for Excel users is exporting to CSV and trying to import into Shipday. If the column headers match exactly what Shipday expects, you're lucky. If they don't — and they usually don't — you're reformatting column names, reordering fields, and stripping out anything Shipday doesn't recognize before you can even attempt the import.

For a batch of 40 orders, that reformatting step eats 30 minutes before a single order lands in Shipday. Multiply that across weekly runs and you're looking at hours every month spent preparing a file that should just work. And if your import partially fails, you'll spend another stretch figuring out which rows made it in and which didn't.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has Shipday connector options that can trigger on a schedule or a file change and create orders in Shipday from your worksheet data.

Before going further — are you comfortable with Power Automate flows? Do you know how to set up an action, configure a connector, and map fields between a data source and an API? If those aren't familiar concepts, this isn't the path for you. Jump to Method 3 or 4 instead.

For those still reading: the flow involves authenticating with your Shipday API key, configuring a trigger on your workbook or a timed run, and mapping each column to the correct Shipday order field. This is achievable if you know the tool. The results are repeatable once it's set up.

But a flow that processes one row at a time is not the same as a bulk operation.

Sending 80 orders through a Power Automate flow means 80 separate API calls executing sequentially, and when row 34 fails because the phone number has dashes instead of digits, the flow logs the error and continues — which means you have a partially-created batch and no easy way to know which orders succeeded.

You probably just need the morning's deliveries in Shipday before the drivers log on. You probably have no idea where to start building a Power Automate flow for this — and that's a perfectly reasonable place to be. So you hand it to whoever on your team handles IT requests, and now you're in a queue somewhere waiting for a fix that should have taken ten minutes.

Adding conditional logic — only process rows where column H says "ready," skip anything where the address is blank — turns the flow into a project.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best repeatable option for workbook-to-Shipday workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings, save a template, and run it on demand. You mapped your columns to Shipday fields, saved the configuration, and fired it off each time you needed to sync.

That was a real step forward from the CSV reformatting cycle. The config was saved and reusable, output was consistent, and you didn't have to touch the file format every run.

But you were still building and maintaining the entire mapping yourself. Every column linked by hand. Every conditional rule — which rows to include, which to skip — written by you. The add-on got the data through, but the schema knowledge stayed in your head. And any structural change to your workbook — a new "delivery notes" column, a renamed header — broke the config until someone went back in and updated it.

This is the previous generation. Useful for teams who could afford a dedicated setup owner. Brittle for everyone else.

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 what you're looking at, understands your column layout, and through its built-in Shipday integration it can create orders, pull dispatch status, update records, or add driver accounts — from a natural-language prompt. No template configuration, no Power Automate flow, no reformatting headers before import.

Example 1: Create orders from a pending batch

Read my Delivery Queue Excel sheet and create one Shipday order per row where column G says 'pending', then mark column H as 'submitted' for each success

Orders are created for every pending row. Column H gets updated in place so you know which ones went through. Rows that fail get a note in column I.

Example 2: Pull active orders into a dispatch worksheet

Pull all active Shipday orders into my Excel Dispatch Dashboard and highlight rows in red where no driver is assigned yet

The pattern: instead of toggling between Shipday and your workbook, you ask once and the data comes to you — already formatted, already flagged for action.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a delivery list or a driver onboarding file, then ask it to sync with Shipday in either direction. The Shipday integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.