The Scenario
You are a portrait photographer. Three years ago you switched from a paper-and-email system to a CRM built in Excel. It worked at the time. Now you are moving to Tave and you have 250 past clients in that workbook — first name, last name, email, phone, city, and state on the Clients tab — ready to load into Tave's address book.
The Tave address book has no bulk import for contacts. You can add them one at a time through the interface, or you can try the API.
The bad version of this week:
- You try the Tave CSV import and find it only works for jobs, not contacts
- You look up the Tave API documentation for contacts
- You write a script, get an authentication error, debug it for an afternoon
- You get five contacts in, find out you misspelled the field name for phone number, delete and redo them
- You enter 43 contacts over three evenings and decide the other 207 can wait until next year.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads each row and calls the Tave API to create the contact, so you do not have to touch the API documentation or write a script.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create an address book entry in Tave for every row in the Clients tab — column A is first name, B is last name, C is email, D is phone, E is city, F is state. Write the result status into column G.
SheetXAI reads each row from the Clients tab, creates the Tave contact, and logs the result. You step away and come back to 250 contacts in the Tave address book.
What You Get
A populated Tave address book, created from your workbook:
- One contact per row — name, email, phone, and address set from your columns
- Status column — column G fills in with success or error for each row
- Error detail — if a row fails (duplicate email, missing required field), the message tells you exactly which row and why
You do not touch the Tave interface once. No form-filling, no copy-pasting from the workbook. The import runs in the background.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Old CRM workbooks are rarely perfectly formatted. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the import in the same prompt.
When phone numbers are in inconsistent formats
Some rows have (555) 123-4567, some have 555-123-4567, some have 5551234567. Excel may have reformatted some as numbers, stripping leading zeros.
Normalize all phone numbers in column D of the Clients tab to (XXX) XXX-XXXX format. Then create a Tave address book entry for every row using column A for first name, B for last name, C for email, normalized phone, E for city, and F for state. Write the result status into column G.
When some rows are missing an email address
A handful of old clients have no email on file. You still want them in Tave.
For rows in the Clients tab where column C is blank, create the Tave contact without an email. For all other rows, include the email. Create one Tave address book entry per row. Write the result status into column G.
When names are stored as a single full-name column
Your old CRM has a "Full Name" column in column A rather than separate first and last name fields.
Split the full name in column A of the Clients tab into first name and last name — use the first word as the first name and everything after as the last name. Then create a Tave address book entry for each row using the split name, column B for email, column C for phone, column D for city, column E for state. Write the result status into column F.
When the workbook has duplicate emails and you want to deduplicate before importing
You merged two lists and know there are duplicates. You do not want duplicate contacts in Tave.
Before creating Tave contacts, identify any rows in the Clients tab that share an email address in column C and keep only the first occurrence. Then create a Tave address book entry for each unique row using column A for first name, B for last name, C for email, D for phone, E for city, and F for state. Write the result status into column G and note skipped duplicates in column H.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the workbook first and then importing, you ask for both in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your client workbook, then ask it to create Tave contacts from every row. The Tave integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export your job pipeline for review or the Tave in Excel overview.