The Scenario
A content strategist at a podcast production company has just wrapped a competitor analysis kickoff call. The deliverable: a keyword and talking-point breakdown across 30 competitor YouTube episodes, due by the end of the week. The episode URLs are already logged in an Excel workbook — column A, inherited from the research coordinator who built the original tracking sheet. What is missing is the actual transcript text that makes the analysis possible.
The bad version:
- Open each URL, navigate to the YouTube transcript panel, copy the raw text with timestamps.
- Paste into column B. Spend five minutes cleaning the timestamp formatting out of the first cell. Multiply by 30.
- Realise on row 14 that one video has no auto-captions, which means there is no transcript at all through this route.
The episode research is supposed to take two days. The transcript collection alone is threatening to eat the first day entirely.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the URLs already in the sheet and, through its built-in Supadata integration, fetches transcript text for each video and writes the results back — flagging any failures — in one operation.
Fetch transcripts for all 30 video URLs in column A using Supadata and put the transcript text in column B of this Excel sheet — mark rows where transcript is unavailable as 'No captions'
What You Get
- Column B filled with clean plain-text transcripts, one per row, with no timestamp noise.
- Rows where captions are unavailable labelled 'No captions' so you know exactly which videos need a manual workaround.
- The full batch processed in a single operation — no row-by-row work on your end.
- Transcripts clean enough to paste directly into a keyword analysis tool.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some URLs have tracking parameters that could interfere with the fetch
URLs copied from YouTube share buttons often include ?si= tokens.
For each YouTube URL in column A, strip any query parameters and use Supadata to fetch the transcript for the clean video URL — write the transcript into column B and log the cleaned URL into column D
The workbook mixes YouTube and other video platform URLs
Column A has a mix of YouTube and Vimeo links from different contributors.
For each URL in column A, use Supadata to fetch the transcript if the URL is from YouTube — write the transcript into column B and mark non-YouTube rows as 'Platform not supported' in column C
You only need transcripts for the highest-priority episodes
Column C already has a priority tag for the 10 episodes flagged in the kickoff call.
Use Supadata to fetch transcripts only for rows where column C says 'Priority' — write the transcript text into column B and leave other rows unchanged
You want word count and transcript length alongside the raw text
The keyword density model works better when you can filter by transcript length before running it.
For each YouTube URL in column A, use Supadata to fetch the full transcript and write it into column B — then write the word count into column C and flag any transcript under 500 words as 'Too short' in column D
The pattern: asking for derived metrics in the same prompt means the filtering layer is already built by the time the data arrives.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of YouTube URLs — a competitor research log, a content audit, a media list — and ask it to pull all the transcripts in one shot. Look at the spoke on pulling YouTube video metadata to add performance context to the same workbook.