The Scenario
A colleague who left the company three weeks ago owned the Shotstack account. She built the templates, named them inconsistently, and documented none of it. You inherited the account and need to figure out what templates exist, save a new one for an upcoming campaign, and get a clean list of everything into the team's master workbook — the one everyone checks before starting a new project.
The bad version:
- Log into Shotstack, click through to the templates section, and manually read off the template names and IDs to copy into the workbook one by one.
- Then switch to a text editor, write the JSON for the new template timeline, paste it into the Shotstack API via Postman, submit the create call, and copy the returned template ID back into the workbook by hand.
- Update the workbook, rename it to something coherent, and hope it stays accurate until the next person changes a template without telling anyone.
This is the kind of work that gets skipped precisely because it feels like it should be easy but takes an hour. And because it gets skipped, the team keeps asking "which template is that?" in Slack.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It can create a new Shotstack template from a timeline configuration, then list all templates on the account and write them into your workbook — in one ask.
Save the video timeline configuration in cell B1 as a Shotstack template named "Email-Header-Template" with merge fields for title and subtitle, then write the new template ID into cell C1
SheetXAI reads cell B1 for the timeline JSON, submits the template create call to Shotstack, and writes the returned template ID into C1.
What You Get
- A new Shotstack template created with the name and timeline you specified, with the returned template ID written into the workbook.
- Every existing account template listed in the worksheet: template ID in one column, name in the next, creation date in the third.
- A single source of truth in the workbook that any team member can check without needing API credentials.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The timeline JSON in B1 has merge field placeholders you need to rename first
The template was built by a contractor who used generic merge field names like "var1" and "var2", and you want them renamed to "title" and "subtitle" before saving.
In the JSON in cell B1, replace all merge field references named "var1" with "title" and "var2" with "subtitle", then create a new Shotstack template named "Email-Header-Template" using the updated JSON — write the new template ID into cell C1
You want to filter the template list to only show templates created in the last 90 days
The account has dozens of templates going back two years and you only care about the active ones.
Create a new Shotstack template named "Email-Header-Template" using the timeline JSON in cell B1 and write the new template ID into cell C1, then list all account templates created in the last 90 days and write their ID, name, and creation date into columns A through C starting at row 3
The workbook already has a partial template list and you want to merge without duplicates
Rows 2 through 15 already have template IDs from a previous manual export.
List all Shotstack account templates and add any IDs not already present in column A to the bottom of the existing list — write the template name and creation date into columns B and C for each new row
Create the template, list everything, and add a last-refreshed timestamp in one go
Create a new Shotstack template named "Email-Header-Template" using the timeline in cell B1 — write the new template ID into C1 — then retrieve all account templates and write their ID, name, and creation date into rows starting at row 5, and put today's date in cell E1 as "Library last refreshed"
The reason to do it all in one prompt: the workbook should reflect the account state at the moment you updated it, not at two different points separated by manual steps.
Try It
Open an Excel workbook where your team tracks templates and Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI — ask it to create a new template from a JSON configuration in a cell and then populate the full account template list. See also: Inspect media metadata before building your timeline and the Shotstack overview.