How to Connect Short Menu to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Short Menu

You have an Excel workbook full of destination URLs — affiliate links, campaign landing pages, product detail pages — and you need Short Menu short links generated for each one, or you need a batch of expired links cleaned out of your account, without opening Short Menu and clicking through the dashboard row by row.

Short Menu is good at creating and managing short links with optional custom domains. But the moment you have more than a handful of URLs to process, the default workflow falls apart. For Excel users, the usual path is exporting or copying URL columns into Short Menu's dashboard manually, then importing results back — a roundtrip that compounds with every batch.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default for Excel users often starts with a CSV export. You pull the URL column into a file, then paste each entry into Short Menu one at a time, copy the resulting short link, and enter it back into the workbook.

If you've got three or four links, fine. If you've got forty campaign URLs that all need short links before a launch email goes out, you're repeating the same four steps for every row. Each cycle takes maybe thirty seconds. That's twenty minutes of mechanical repetition with zero margin for a misplaced paste.

The specific grind with this workflow isn't the time alone — it's that the only feedback loop is you checking each cell by eye. Miss one and you won't know until a link doesn't resolve.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has an HTTP action that can call the Short Menu API. You can build a flow that triggers on new rows in an Excel table, posts a URL to the Short Menu create-link endpoint, and writes the returned short URL back into the table.

Before going further: are you comfortable with REST connectors? HTTP request bodies? Parsing JSON responses in Power Automate expressions? If those feel unfamiliar, this isn't your path — skip to Method 3 or 4. The people who succeed here are the ones who already live in the Power Platform.

For those still here: you'll authenticate against the Short Menu API using a key in the HTTP action header, parse the shortUrl field out of the JSON response, and map it back into the correct column in your Excel table. The logic works.

The problem is that it fires one row at a time.

Running fifty URLs means fifty separate HTTP calls, fifty flow runs, and a run history that goes opaque fast when row 18 fails because the URL contains a special character that breaks the query string.

You probably just need a filled-in column of short links and you have no idea how to wire a Power Automate HTTP connector — and that's entirely reasonable. So the request gets pushed to whoever on your team understands the Power Platform. And now you're waiting. Possibly for a while.

Chaining in custom domain logic, duplicate filtering, or a status column for failed rows means more steps, more expressions, and a higher license tier to match.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable Excel ↔ Short Menu workflows was a category of add-ins that let you define column mappings and run saved configurations. You set up which column held your URLs, where the short links should land, saved the config, and ran it.

That was a real step up from copy-paste. Consistent output, reusable configs, no reformatting each time.

But you were still responsible for every mapping decision, every edge case, every rule about which rows to include. The tool moved the data, but the design of the process was entirely on you. And the moment your sheet schema changed, the config broke until someone went back in and repaired it.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

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 the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Short Menu integration it can create links, fetch your custom domains, or delete expired links for you. No template configuration, no automation glue, no summarizing your data by hand. You just ask.

Example 1: Generate short links for a column of destination URLs

Create a Short Menu short link for each URL in column A and write the generated short link into column B

SheetXAI reads every populated row in column A, sends each URL to Short Menu, and writes the returned short URL back into the matching row in column B — one pass, no clicking through the dashboard.

Example 2: Generate short links using a specific custom domain

Generate Short Menu links for all 50 URLs in column A using the custom domain in cell D1 and write the short URLs into column B

The pattern: instead of hardcoding a domain or managing it outside the workbook, you reference it as a cell value. SheetXAI reads that cell and applies the domain to every link inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of destination URLs, then ask it to generate Short Menu short links and write them back. The Short Menu integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.