The Scenario
A hydrologist walks into Monday's team meeting and is asked which Stormglass tide stations exist within the study area for a coastal flooding project. The bounding box coordinates are in an Excel workbook. She needs a table of station names, IDs, and positions — today — so the data team can start pulling tidal records before the end of the week.
The bad version:
- Look up the Stormglass tide station endpoint, figure out how to pass the bounding box as query parameters (minLat, minLng, maxLat, maxLng), run the API call with the four values pulled manually from cells A1, B1, A2, and B2.
- Parse the returned array of station objects, pull the id, name, latitude, and longitude from each, and paste them into a new table starting at row 5.
- Realize the station list has 23 entries and you pasted the coordinates in the wrong column order for the last eight because you lost your place in the JSON.
The data team needs this by 3 PM. It's 10 AM.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the bounding box values from the cells you point to, understands that you want a Stormglass station lookup within that region, queries the API with the correct parameters, and writes the station list as a properly labeled table — without you touching the endpoint documentation or parsing a single object.
Fetch all Stormglass tide stations within the geographic bounding box defined in my Excel cells and list station ID, name, latitude, and longitude in a table starting at row 3.
What You Get
- A table starting at row 3 with headers: Station ID, Station Name, Latitude, Longitude.
- One row per station returned by Stormglass within the bounding box.
- A note in row 3 if no stations are found within the bounding box — so you know immediately whether to widen the search area rather than staring at a blank output.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The bounding box covers a very large region and the station list needs filtering by country
The study area spans an international maritime boundary and you only want stations in one country's territorial waters.
Query Stormglass for tide stations using the bounding box in cells A1, B1, A2, B2. Filter the results to stations whose name or metadata indicates they are in Norway, then write station ID, name, latitude, and longitude into a table at A5.
You have multiple bounding boxes in the workbook — one per sub-region — and need a separate station list for each
The project covers three sub-study areas with their own bounding box rows.
For each bounding box defined in rows 1 through 3 (columns A and B for min corner, columns C and D for max corner), query Stormglass for tide stations within that box and write the station list for each region into a separate section below row 6, labeled with the region name from column E.
The bounding box values are in the wrong order — lng and lat are swapped
Someone entered the coordinates as lng, lat instead of lat, lng. Stormglass will return wrong results or nothing.
Check whether the bounding box values in cells A1, B1, A2, B2 appear to have longitude and latitude swapped (longitude values typically range from −180 to 180, latitude from −90 to 90). If they look swapped, correct them before querying Stormglass for tide stations in that area, then write the station table at A5.
Validate the bounding box, query all sub-regions, deduplicate cross-boundary stations, and export a clean reference table
The study has three sub-areas, some stations appear in overlapping bounding boxes, and the output needs to be a single deduplicated reference table for the data team.
For each bounding box in rows 1 through 3 (min corner in columns A and B, max corner in columns C and D), query Stormglass for tide stations. Combine all results, remove duplicate station IDs, and write a clean table of unique stations — ID, name, latitude, longitude, and which sub-regions include them — starting at A7.
Handling the dedup and the cross-region inclusion flag in the same prompt means the data team gets a single reference table they can use immediately.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with coastal bounding box coordinates, then ask it to find Stormglass tide stations within that region. The Stormglass.io integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. Also see exporting the full tide station catalog or the Stormglass.io overview.