The Scenario
You are a fulfillment coordinator at a subscription box company. The monthly shipment run is in 48 hours and you have 1,000 customer shipping addresses in an Excel workbook — the Customer Addresses tab, columns A through F: street, city, state, ZIP, country, and customer name.
Last month, 23 packages came back undeliverable. Each one cost $8 in return shipping plus a re-ship fee. The ops director has been clear: validate before the label run, not after.
The bad version of the next two hours:
- Export the workbook tab as a CSV
- Log into ShipEngine, run the bulk validation tool
- Download the results
- Match them back to the workbook by row
- Flag the failures
- You are still not done when the label run starts.
The fast version is one prompt in the sidebar.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the rows and calls ShipEngine's address validation API for you, so you never have to leave the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read the address list in the Customer Addresses tab (columns A–F) and validate each one with ShipEngine, writing the normalized address back into columns H–L and a status flag into column M. If ShipEngine returns a corrected address, write that instead of the original.
SheetXAI reads the tab, sends each address to ShipEngine, and writes the normalized address and status flag back. One thousand rows without leaving Excel.
What You Get
Columns H through M updated for all 1,000 rows:
- Columns H–L — the normalized address components: street, city, state, ZIP, country
- Column M — 'valid', 'invalid', or 'corrected' depending on ShipEngine's result
The invalid and corrected rows are your pre-label work queue. Send them to the customer service team, get the fixes, and run the label job only on the validated subset.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Subscription address data is rarely clean. SheetXAI handles the normalization and the validation in the same prompt.
When ZIP codes have inconsistent formatting
Some are five digits, some are ZIP+4, some are missing the leading zero.
Normalize the ZIP code in column D of the Customer Addresses tab — pad any 4-digit codes with a leading zero, strip the ZIP+4 suffix. Then validate each address with ShipEngine and write normalized components into columns H–L and status into column M.
When the state column has full names instead of abbreviations
The workbook has "California" and "New York" where ShipEngine expects "CA" and "NY."
Convert the state values in column C of the Customer Addresses tab to two-letter abbreviations. Then validate each address and write the normalized result into columns H–L and status into column M.
When you only want to process rows not yet validated
You ran partial validation last week. Column M has values for the first 400 rows already.
Skip rows in the Customer Addresses tab where column M is already filled. Validate the remaining rows with ShipEngine and write results into columns H–L and column M.
When the data spans multiple tabs and you need a merged validated list
The Domestic tab, the International tab, and the PO Box tab each have address data in different column layouts.
Combine the address rows from the Domestic, International, and PO Box tabs into a new tab called Master — standardize to columns A through F: street, city, state, ZIP, country, name. Then validate every row against ShipEngine and write the normalized address into columns H–L and the status flag into column M.
The pattern: merge and validate in one prompt, not two separate sessions.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a column of shipping addresses, then ask it to validate them with ShipEngine. The ShipEngine integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to get bulk rate quotes after validation or the ShipEngine in Excel overview.