How to Connect Shotstack to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Shotstack

You have an Excel workbook full of data — customer names, product images, render template IDs, footage URLs. Shotstack is built to turn that data into video at scale. But actually moving the two together is nowhere near as automatic as the API's documentation implies.

Shotstack is a cloud-based video, image, and audio generation API. It accepts a template with merge fields, fires a render job, and eventually returns a hosted video URL. But the connection between your workbook and that pipeline is entirely up to you. The usual flow is: export a CSV from Excel, parse it in a script or paste values into a JSON body, hit the API manually, copy render IDs back into the sheet, wait, check status, copy URLs back. Repeat for every row.

Below are the four ways teams typically approach this. Only the last one removes the repetition.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

You open the workbook, find the row you need, copy the relevant values — customer name, template ID, image URL — then switch to a Postman tab or a basic script, paste them into the request body, fire the call, and paste the render ID into column C. More often than not, teams export a CSV and feed it into a one-off script rather than copying row by row.

For a single render, this is manageable. But Shotstack's real value is batch production — running the same operation across 30 or 200 rows. At that scale, the export-and-paste loop turns into a data-entry shift. You are not rendering video at that point. You are manually bridging two tools that were built to work together automatically.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has connector options that can reach the Shotstack API via HTTP actions. You can configure a trigger on an Excel table row, construct the render payload, call Shotstack, and write the returned render ID back into the table.

Before you go further — are you comfortable with Power Automate flows? HTTP connectors? Dynamic content expressions? If those feel foreign, this path will take you longer than it saves. Method 3 or 4 will get you there faster.

If you're still here: the flow is buildable. You set a trigger on the Excel table, construct the Shotstack JSON body with dynamic content from the row, call the endpoint, parse the response, and write the render ID back. Because renders are asynchronous, you need a second flow that polls status on a schedule and conditionally writes the video URL once the render completes.

But building one flow per step is not the same as having an end-to-end pipeline.

Two separate flows — submit and poll — means two sets of triggers, two maintenance surfaces, and a gap in between where you have no visibility unless you build logging too.

You probably just need the rendered video URLs in column D. You probably have no idea how to build an asynchronous polling flow in Power Automate. So you hand it to your IT contact, and now you're waiting on their backlog. If it hasn't already been pushed below three higher-priority requests.

Cost and licensing complexity grow fast once you're running HTTP-connected multi-step flows at volume.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the closest thing to a repeatable workbook-to-API workflow was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings, name your endpoints, and save configs for reuse. You picked your range, tagged your fields, saved a template, and ran it.

That was a meaningful improvement over export-and-paste. The output was consistent, configs were shareable, and the team could re-run the same call without rebuilding it from scratch.

But the mapping was still entirely your responsibility. You had to know which column fed which merge field, handle the status polling separately, and update the config every time the worksheet structure changed. The add-on moved the data through, but the design decisions stayed with you. And when a column got renamed or Shotstack updated a field, the config broke until someone went back in and repaired it by hand.

This was the previous generation of the problem. A real step forward, but still operator-heavy.

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 your worksheet, understands the structure — which column holds the template ID, which columns are merge fields, which column should receive the render ID — and through its built-in Shotstack integration it submits render jobs and polls for results without you constructing a single JSON payload.

Example 1: Submit a batch of personalized render jobs

Submit Shotstack render jobs for all 30 products in my Excel table using the template in cell F1 — merge field names from column A, image URLs from column B, prices from column C — and paste render IDs into column D

SheetXAI reads F1 for the template ID, iterates every row in the table, constructs the merge field payloads, submits each render job, and writes the returned render IDs into column D as they come back.

Example 2: Collect hosted URLs once renders complete

Check all 40 Shotstack render IDs in column A of my Excel table, retrieve the hosted video URL for each completed render, and write the URLs into column B

The pattern: instead of logging into Shotstack's dashboard to check render progress and manually copying URLs, you ask for both the status check and the writeback in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the polling and conditional write inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with template IDs or render IDs, then ask it to submit a batch to Shotstack. The Shotstack integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.