The Scenario
You manage e-commerce for a brand with 30 products launching next week. The product team handed you a spreadsheet: column A is the product name, column B is a CDN image URL, column C is the price. You have a Shotstack template — ID in cell E1 — with merge fields for those three values. Each product gets its own 15-second showcase video for social ads.
The bad version:
- Open the template in the Shotstack editor, plug in the first product's values by hand, preview it, submit the render, copy the render ID into column D.
- Do that 29 more times — pausing to look up column values for each row — and hope the price in column C matches what's actually going into the frame.
- Come back an hour later, check each render ID manually, and download 30 video files before re-uploading them to your ad platform.
Thirty products is not a large catalog. But manually bridging a workbook to a video API for 30 rows consumes most of a working day, and you still have ad copy to write.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the columns, identifies the merge fields, and submits render jobs to Shotstack for every row — all from a single natural-language prompt.
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, iterates rows with data in columns A, B, and C, constructs the merge payload for each, submits the render job, and writes the returned render ID into column D as each call completes.
What You Get
- Column D fills with Shotstack render IDs, one per row, as submissions succeed.
- Rows where Shotstack returns an error get a readable error note in column D rather than a blank cell.
- You can poll for completed renders and write hosted video URLs with a follow-up prompt once the renders finish processing.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Prices are formatted inconsistently
Column C has a mix of "$29.99", "29.99", and "29" — and the template expects a consistent format with the dollar sign.
Before submitting render jobs, normalize column C so every price starts with a dollar sign and has two decimal places, then submit Shotstack renders using template E1 with columns A, B, and the cleaned C as merge fields — write render IDs into column D
Some image URLs are broken or empty
A few rows in column B have placeholder text or blank cells where the real CDN URL should be.
Submit Shotstack render jobs for rows where column B is a valid URL — skip any row where column B is blank or does not start with "https" — write render IDs into column D and flag skipped rows with "missing image" in column E
The template ID varies by product category
Column E has product category — "apparel", "accessories", "footwear" — and you have three template IDs in cells F1, F2, and F3.
Submit Shotstack render jobs for each row: use template F1 for apparel, F2 for accessories, F3 for footwear based on column E — merge fields from columns A, B, and C — write render IDs into column D
Validate the catalog, normalize data, and submit all renders in one pass
Normalize prices in column C to include a dollar sign and two decimal places, skip rows where column B is blank and mark them "skipped" in column E, then submit Shotstack render jobs for all remaining rows using template E1 with product name from A, image URL from B, and cleaned price from C — write render IDs into column D
The underlying logic: you do not need to run a cleanup pass, verify the output, then come back and trigger the automation. Ask for all of it in sequence in one prompt.
Try It
Open your product catalog workbook and Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI, then ask it to batch-submit renders to Shotstack using your template ID. The Shotstack integration is available on every SheetXAI plan. Also see: Batch render personalized videos and the Shotstack overview.