The Scenario
You are a customer service manager at an e-commerce brand. It is Tuesday morning and 80 customer emails are waiting, all variations of "where is my package." The tracking numbers are already in an Excel workbook — Shipment Status tab, column A has tracking numbers, column B has carrier codes. Columns C and D are empty.
Your team needs to know which packages are delivered, in transit, or in exception before the morning standup at 10 AM.
The bad version of Tuesday morning:
- Copy tracking number one from the workbook
- Go to ShipEngine's dashboard or the carrier's site
- Find the status
- Switch back to Excel
- Type the status into column C
- Repeat 80 times
- Miss the standup, again.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads each row and calls ShipEngine's tracking API, so the status is in the workbook before the standup.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read all tracking numbers in column A of my Shipment Status Excel workbook and look up each one in ShipEngine using the carrier code in column B, writing the delivery status and estimated delivery date into columns C and D. Flag any exceptions in column E.
SheetXAI reads the tab, calls ShipEngine's tracking endpoint per row, and writes current status, estimated delivery date, and exception flags back into the workbook.
What You Get
Columns C, D, and E populated for all 80 rows:
- Column C — current status: "delivered," "in_transit," "exception," or "unknown"
- Column D — estimated delivery date where ShipEngine returns one
- Column E — exception reason for any rows with an exception status
Sort column C to pull exceptions to the top. Your team works the exception rows first, ignores the delivered ones, and checks back on the in-transit cases later.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Tracking sheets from multi-carrier operations have consistent gaps. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the lookup in the same prompt.
When carrier codes are missing for some rows
The workbook has tracking numbers but the carrier column is blank for 15 rows.
For rows in the Shipment Status tab where column B is blank, ask ShipEngine to detect the carrier from the tracking number. Then fetch status and estimated delivery date for all rows and write results into columns C and D.
When some tracking numbers appear twice
The export ran twice and you have paired duplicate rows.
Deduplicate the Shipment Status tab by the tracking number in column A, keeping the first occurrence. Then fetch ShipEngine tracking status and estimated delivery date for all unique rows and write results into columns C and D.
When you only need to re-check rows not yet showing delivered
You ran this yesterday. Half the rows already show "delivered" in column C.
Skip any rows in the Shipment Status tab where column C already contains 'delivered'. Fetch ShipEngine tracking status for all remaining rows and update columns C and D.
When the ops director wants a summary in addition to row-level status
The director wants a single-cell summary, not just a raw table.
Fetch ShipEngine tracking status for every row in the Shipment Status tab using tracking numbers in column A and carrier codes in column B. Write status and estimated delivery date into columns C and D. Then write a summary into cell F1: total packages, how many are delivered, how many in transit, how many in exception. List the exception tracking numbers in column F starting at row 3.
The pattern: pull the status and build the summary in one prompt, so you walk into the standup with both.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a column of tracking numbers, then ask it to pull ShipEngine tracking status for every row. The ShipEngine integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export labels for billing reconciliation in Excel or the ShipEngine in Excel overview.