The Scenario
Your O&M contractor just started. They're taking over a 500 kW rooftop installation — single-axis tracking — and they need the full technical specification for the site before their first visit. The engineering team registered this site in Solcast months ago. Somewhere in your Solcast account is the resource ID. The contractor needs every parameter: capacity_dc, capacity_ac, tilt, azimuth, tracking type, loss factors, GPS coordinates. They want it in a reference workbook.
The bad version:
- Search through your email or a shared drive to find the resource ID from when the site was originally registered
- Open Solcast, navigate to the site record, and start manually transcribing parameters into an Excel worksheet — capacity_dc, capacity_ac, tilt, azimuth, tracking_type, latitude, longitude, then each derating factor one by one
- Discover three parameters deep that the loss factors are stored as an array and you have no idea how to represent them in a flat table
The contractor's site visit is Tuesday. The documentation needs to be ready Monday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It connects to Solcast through its built-in integration, retrieves the full configuration for any site by resource ID, and writes every parameter into a two-column table — parameter name in column A, value in column B.
Fetch the Solcast site details for resource ID 'site-456' and write the site name, capacity_dc, capacity_ac, tilt, azimuth, tracking_type, latitude, longitude, and all derating factors into this Excel sheet
What You Get
- A two-column table: column A has each parameter name as returned by the Solcast API, column B has the value
- Every field included — nothing left in a nested JSON structure that doesn't land in the workbook
- Each derating factor listed as its own row, labeled clearly
- The contractor can read it without knowing anything about the Solcast API schema
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The resource ID is in a cell rather than pasted into the prompt
Retrieve the Solcast site with the resource ID from cell B2 of this sheet, and write all configuration parameters and values into columns A and B starting at row 5
The contractor wants the table labeled with friendlier names than the API field names
Fetch the Solcast site for resource ID 'site-456'. Write the parameters into columns A and B, and for each of these fields use the human-readable label: capacity_dc → 'DC Capacity (kW)', capacity_ac → 'AC Capacity (kW)', tilt → 'Panel Tilt (°)', azimuth → 'Panel Azimuth (°)', tracking_type → 'Tracking Type', loss_factor → 'System Loss Factor'. Leave all other field names as returned by the API
The same workbook needs configurations for three sites side by side for a comparison
Fetch Solcast site configurations for resource IDs 'abc-123-def', 'xyz-456-ghi', and 'lmn-789-pqr'. Write the parameter names into column A and the values for each site into columns B, C, and D respectively, with the site name as a header in row 1 of each column
Pull the config, compare it to the design spec in this workbook, and flag discrepancies in one prompt
Retrieve the Solcast configuration for resource ID 'site-456' and compare it to the design spec values in column B of this sheet (parameter names in column A). For each parameter, write the Solcast value in column C and 'match' or 'mismatch' in column D based on whether the values agree within 5%
The pattern is to fold the retrieval, the comparison, and the labeling into one instruction so the documentation workbook is ready rather than raw.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you have a Solcast resource ID — even just typed into a cell — and ask it to write the full site configuration as a parameter/value table. Also see bulk-registering new sites or the Solcast integration overview.