The Scenario
You manage a fleet of long-haul trucks and you've been tasked with an EV transition feasibility study. Five of your existing truck routes are defined as sequences of waypoints in an Excel workbook. For each route, you need to know which EV charging stations are accessible within a 10-minute detour — so you can assess whether the existing infrastructure supports the transition without adding unacceptable time to each run.
Your routes are in the workbook. TomTom's along-route search can answer the question. Getting from the workbook to the API and back is the problem.
The bad version:
- Take the first route's waypoints, encode them into TomTom's route format, make the along-route search API call with the charging station category, parse the paginated response, extract station names, addresses, and detour times, paste them into the workbook
- Repeat for all five routes
- Discover route 3 has 12 waypoints and the API call failed silently on pagination so you only got results for the first 8
The feasibility report is due to the fleet director by end of month.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the route waypoints, calls TomTom's along-route search, and writes the charging station results back into the workbook.
Using the origin in cell A1, destination in cell B1, and the route encoded in column C, search TomTom for restaurants accessible within 5 minutes of detour and write their names and distances into this Excel sheet
What You Get
- One row per POI found along the route within the detour budget
- Columns for name, address, and detour time in minutes
- Route identifier so you can filter by route in the consolidated output
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Each route is on a separate worksheet
For each worksheet in this workbook whose name starts with "Route", read the waypoint coordinates in columns A and B, search TomTom for EV charging stations within a 10-minute detour of that route, and write the results into a "Chargers" sheet with the worksheet name in column A to identify which route each station belongs to.
Detour budget varies by route
For each route defined by waypoints in columns A and B, use the detour budget in minutes from the column C header row to search TomTom for EV charging stations accessible within that detour. Write station name, address, and detour time into the results sheet.
You want the full waypoint-based route search
For the route defined by the waypoint coordinates in columns A and B of this workbook, search TomTom for EV charging stations accessible within a 10-minute detour and write each station's name, address, and detour time into a results sheet
Full feasibility summary across all five routes
For each of the 5 routes defined in worksheets "Route1" through "Route5", search TomTom for EV charging stations within a 10-minute detour. Write all results to a "Chargers" sheet with route name, station name, address, and detour time. Then write a summary table showing route name and charger count per route into a "Summary" sheet. Flag any route with zero chargers as "no coverage."
One prompt searches all five routes, consolidates the results, builds the summary, and flags coverage gaps.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook with your route waypoints, then ask it to find charging stations along each route using TomTom. For planning full EV routes with charging stops built in from the start, see the EV route planning spoke.