The Scenario
Your colleague left last month. She owned the Spotlightr library for your course platform, and somewhere in her handoff notes is an Excel workbook with 45 training video URLs, titles, and project group names — a batch she never got around to uploading before her last day. The courses go live in two weeks. You have the workbook. You have Spotlightr access. You do not have any intention of clicking through 45 video creation forms.
The bad version:
- Open Spotlightr, navigate to the first project group, click "Add Video," paste the source URL from the first row of the Excel table, type the title, save.
- Switch back to Excel, find the next row, switch back to Spotlightr, click "Add Video" again, paste the next URL, type the next title, pick the project from the dropdown.
- After an hour and 15 videos, discover you've misread one URL and the video at row 8 is returning a 404. Now you have to figure out which one.
The course launches in twelve days. Forty-five manual form submissions is not a plan — it's a week of your time dressed up as a task.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the columns, understands the structure, and talks to Spotlightr on your behalf. Open the workbook, open the SheetXAI sidebar, and describe what you need.
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.
What You Get
- A new Spotlightr video created for each row in the table, with the title from the Video Name column and the source URL from the YouTube URL column.
- Each video assigned to the Spotlightr project group matching the Group column — missing groups are flagged in the Status column rather than silently skipped.
- The returned Spotlightr video ID written back into the next available column for rows that succeed.
- Any rows with missing or malformed source URLs noted in the Status column so you can fix them without losing your place.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The source URLs are Google Drive share links, not direct file links
Spotlightr expects a direct file URL, not a Drive viewer link. If the URL column has share links in the format docs.google.com/file/d/... you need them converted before creation.
For each row in this workbook, check if the URL column is a Google Drive share link — if so, convert it to a direct download URL using the file ID, then create the Spotlightr video using the Video Name column as the title and the Group column as the project.
Some rows are missing a project group name
If the Group column is blank on some rows, you don't want those rows to fail silently — but you also don't want to halt the whole batch.
Create Spotlightr videos for every row where the Group column is not empty — use Video Name as title and YouTube URL as source URL, write the video ID into the next column, and write "skipped: no group" for any row where Group is blank.
Videos span two different worksheets in the same workbook
Your workbook has two sheets — "Module 1" and "Module 2" — each with the same column structure. You need both processed in one pass.
Create Spotlightr videos for every row in the "Module 1" sheet and the "Module 2" sheet — Video Name is the title, YouTube URL is the source, Group is the project group. Write returned video IDs into the next column of each respective sheet.
The titles need cleanup and the source URLs need validation before creation
Some titles have trailing spaces and inconsistent capitalization. Some URLs might be redirect chains rather than direct files. You want a single prompt that cleans, validates, and then creates.
For each row in this workbook: trim and title-case the Video Name value, check that the YouTube URL is a reachable direct-file URL, then create the Spotlightr video using the cleaned title and validated URL assigned to the group in the Group column. Write the video ID into the Status column or an error note if the URL failed validation.
One prompt handles the cleanup and the creation — you don't pre-process the workbook separately.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook with your pending video uploads — titles in one column, source URLs in the next, project groups in the third. Ask SheetXAI to create all of them, write the IDs back, and flag anything that needs attention. See also: Pull Spotlightr Analytics Into an Excel workbook and the Spotlightr hub.