The Scenario
You are a digital agency's project lead. End of year cleanup. You have identified 45 expired campaign forms that were built for Q1 and Q2 promotions that have long since ended. They are cluttering the workspace and making the form inventory impossible to navigate.
Your operations manager did a manual review last week and marked each form for deletion in an Excel workbook. The form IDs are in column A of the Cleanup tab, the form names are in column B, and column C says "APPROVED FOR DELETION" on every row.
The manual version:
- Log into Tally
- Open form one, navigate to settings, click delete, confirm the deletion dialog
- Repeat forty-four more times
- Accidentally delete a form that was still live because someone edited the workbook after the review
- Spend two hours trying to recover it and eventually rebuild it from scratch.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the approved deletion list and handles the Tally API calls for you.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Delete every Tally form whose ID is listed in column A of the Cleanup tab, but only if column C says "APPROVED FOR DELETION." Write "DELETED" into column D for each success, and the error message into column D for any failure. Skip any row where column C does not say "APPROVED FOR DELETION" and write "SKIPPED — not approved" into column D.
SheetXAI reads column C as a gate before touching anything in Tally, deletes only the approved forms, and writes the outcome back to column D.
What You Get
45 forms deleted, with outcomes written to column D of the Cleanup tab:
- DELETED — form is gone from Tally, the row is confirmed
- SKIPPED — not approved — column C did not say the expected phrase, form was not touched
- Error messages — for any form ID that returned an error from Tally, with enough detail to know why
The gate on column C is the safety net. Even if someone edits the workbook after the review, any row without "APPROVED FOR DELETION" in column C is skipped automatically.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Cleanup workbooks assembled from multiple rounds of review are rarely clean. SheetXAI handles the edge cases inline.
When some form IDs in column A have already been deleted
A few forms were cleaned up manually before this batch run.
Delete each Tally form in column A of the Cleanup tab where column C says "APPROVED FOR DELETION." If Tally returns a 404 for a form, write "ALREADY DELETED" into column D instead of an error. Write "DELETED" for successful deletions and the error for other failures.
When the approval column has inconsistent values
Some rows say "APPROVED FOR DELETION," some say "Approved," and some say "approved for deletion" in lowercase.
Delete each Tally form in column A of the Cleanup tab where column C contains the word "approved" in any case. Write the result into column D. Skip rows where column C does not contain "approved" and write "SKIPPED" into column D.
When you want to export a final backup inventory before deleting
You want a record of what each form looked like — name, response count — before removing it.
Before deleting any forms, fetch the name and total response count from Tally for each form ID in column A of the Cleanup tab. Write those into columns B and E respectively. Then delete only the forms where column C says "APPROVED FOR DELETION." Write the deletion result into column D.
When the batch is large and you want to process in groups to avoid rate limit errors
Delete the Tally forms in column A of the Cleanup tab where column C says "APPROVED FOR DELETION," processing 10 rows at a time with a short pause between batches. Write "DELETED," "SKIPPED," or the error message into column D for each row as you go.
The pattern: the approval gate, the result log, and the pre-delete inventory all come from variations on one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and paste your approved form IDs into a workbook tab, then ask it to run the deletion batch with a column gate. The Tally integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export a form inventory before cleanup or the Tally in Excel overview.