The Scenario
You're three hours into campaign prep. The brief calls for 120 unique landing page URLs — one per ad variant — and every single one needs a branded short URL before the email sequence goes live tomorrow morning.
You open the Excel workbook. Column A has all 120 long URLs. Column B is empty.
The bad version:
- Open the Shorten.REST dashboard, paste the first URL, copy the alias, switch back to the workbook, paste it into B2, move to the next row.
- Repeat this 119 more times, keeping track of which row you're on so you don't skip one or double-enter.
- Realize at row 80 that three slugs conflicted with existing aliases and Shorten.REST generated fallback names that don't match your naming convention — now you have to find and fix them.
The campaign goes live tomorrow. You were supposed to spend this afternoon on copy review, not on a hundred-and-twenty browser tab switches.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads your data and talks to Shorten.REST for you. Open the SheetXAI sidebar, describe what you need, and it handles the API calls and writebacks.
For each URL in column A that doesn't have a value in column B, create a Shorten.REST alias using the default domain and write the generated short URL into column B. If a slug conflict occurs, note the conflict in column C.
What You Get
- Column B fills with the short URL for each row —
go.mycompany.com/abc123format or whatever your default domain is set to. - Rows where a slug conflict occurred get "conflict" written into column C so you can spot and fix them without scrolling through all 120 rows.
- Rows where column A was blank are skipped automatically.
- The agent confirms how many aliases were created and how many conflicted.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The URLs have trailing spaces and inconsistent formatting
For each URL in column A, trim whitespace and remove any trailing slashes before creating the Shorten.REST alias, then write the cleaned URL into column D and the short URL into column B
Some rows already have short URLs from a previous run
Check column B — if it already contains a Shorten.REST alias, skip that row. Only create new aliases for rows where column B is empty. Write the short URL into column B and "new" into column C.
You need custom slugs from column B, not auto-generated ones
Create Shorten.REST aliases using the long URL in column A and the custom slug in column B. Write the final short URL (including the domain) into column C and the creation timestamp into column D.
Full cleanup + create in one shot
Check column A for blank rows, duplicate URLs, and URLs with malformed protocols. Skip blanks, flag duplicates in column D with "duplicate", fix malformed protocols (missing https://), then create Shorten.REST aliases for all valid rows and write the short URLs into column B.
The pattern is to ask for the cleanup and the creation in the same prompt — SheetXAI does the conditional work inline.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of long campaign URLs, then ask it to create Shorten.REST aliases and write them back. For more on managing link data in your workbook, see how to pull click analytics for short URLs or audit your full alias inventory.