How to Connect Spotlightr to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Spotlightr

You have an Excel workbook full of video data — source URLs, course titles, group assignments, video IDs from your existing Spotlightr library. You need to push that data into Spotlightr to create or update videos, or you need analytics and view records pulled back into the workbook for reporting. Neither direction happens easily.

Spotlightr is good at hosting, gating, and tracking video engagement. But the path between your Excel workbook and your Spotlightr account is almost entirely manual. The default flow is to export a CSV, open the Spotlightr dashboard, and re-enter or re-upload values one at a time — a process that compounds every time the source data changes.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

For Excel users the typical starting point is a CSV export — save the workbook as CSV, open Spotlightr's import interface, and hope the column order lines up. When it doesn't, you reformat and retry. When the import skips rows silently, you hunt through the dashboard to figure out which ones.

Two or three videos and you'd never bother with a CSV. Forty videos and the export-reformat-import cycle starts taking its toll. One wrong header name in the CSV and the whole batch fails at the destination, leaving you to figure out whether the error is in row 6 or row 36.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has a Spotlightr connector option. You can configure a flow triggered by a new row in an Excel table, call the Spotlightr API, and write results back.

Before you go further — do you have experience configuring Power Automate flows? Do you know what a dynamic content expression is? How to set up an HTTP action and parse the JSON response body? How to handle rate limit errors at step three of a five-step flow? If not, skip ahead to Method 3 or 4 — there's a better path.

For those still with me: the flow works. You set the trigger on the Excel table, map the title and URL fields into the HTTP action body, and run a test. It processes rows.

But a flow that fires once per row is not the same as a bulk operation.

Sixty videos means sixty separate flow runs, sixty API calls, and a run history that becomes impossible to audit when five of them fail at different steps for different reasons.

You probably just need the videos created and the IDs written back into the workbook. You probably have no idea how to configure a retry policy inside a Power Automate flow — and nobody should expect you to. So you either hand it to IT or you sit on the problem until someone has a free afternoon.

And once you need filtering, conditional grouping, or a write back into a second worksheet, you've left Power Automate's out-of-the-box capabilities behind.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable Excel-to-Spotlightr workflows was a category of add-ons that let you define a column mapping and run it on demand. You picked your range, tagged the fields, saved a config, and ran it.

That was a real step forward. Configs were reusable, output was consistent, and someone else on the team could run the import without rebuilding the setup.

But the thinking was still on you entirely — which columns map to which API fields, which rows to skip, how to handle a missing URL. The add-on moved the data; the decisions stayed on your plate. When the workbook's column order changed, the config broke until someone went back in and fixed it.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

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 the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in Spotlightr integration it can create videos, pull analytics, manage groups, and write results back — from a single prompt. No template configuration, no CSV reformatting, no manual re-entry.

Example 1: Bulk-create course videos from a roster table

For each row in my Excel table (columns: Video Name, YouTube URL, Group), create a new Spotlightr video linked from that YouTube URL and place it in the matching group.

SheetXAI reads the table, calls the Spotlightr API for each row, and writes the returned video IDs back into the next available column. Rows that fail get a note in the status column.

Example 2: Pull analytics for a weekly performance review

Pull Spotlightr analytics for every video ID listed in my Excel sheet and fill in the play rate and completion rate columns — leave blank if a video has no data yet.

The pattern: instead of exporting from Spotlightr and doing a manual lookup, you ask for the data directly against the IDs already in the workbook. SheetXAI handles the API calls and the writeback in one pass.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with Spotlightr video data — source URLs to upload, video IDs to pull analytics for, or a group mapping to apply. The Spotlightr integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.