The Scenario
It's 7:15 AM and the driver is waiting. You're the dispatcher and you have a list of 8 delivery stops for today's run in an Excel workbook — addresses, customer names, time windows — but they're in the order they were added to the system, not the order they should be driven. The driver leaves at 7:30. If you hand them the list as-is, they'll spend the day doubling back across the city.
The bad version:
- Open Google Maps, manually enter each stop, drag them into an order that looks efficient on the map, screenshot the route
- Try to transfer the optimized order back into the workbook by eye, assigning stop numbers to each row based on the map
- Guess wrong on two of the stops and add 45 minutes to a route the driver has to complete by 5 PM
There's a driver standing by the van. You have 15 minutes.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the delivery addresses, geocodes each one using TomTom, submits them to TomTom's waypoint optimization endpoint, and writes the optimal visit order and estimated arrival times back into the workbook.
For the 8 customer addresses in my Excel sheet column A, use TomTom to find the most efficient drive order starting and ending at the warehouse address in cell B1. Write the ranked order into column B and leg travel times into column C.
What You Get
- Column B: optimized stop number (1 = first visit, 8 = last visit)
- Column C: estimated leg travel time in minutes for each stop
- The round-trip route closes back at the warehouse if you ask for it
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Addresses need geocoding before optimization
For each address in column A, geocode it using TomTom and write lat/lng into columns D and E. Then use those coordinates plus the depot lat/lng in cells F1 and G1 to run TomTom waypoint optimization. Write the optimal visit order into column B and estimated leg time in minutes into column C.
Some stops have hard time windows
Geocode each address in column A using TomTom. For stops with a time window in column C, include that window as a constraint in the TomTom waypoint optimization call. Write the optimized order into column D and estimated arrival time into column E. Flag any stop where arrival falls outside the time window in column F.
The route must start and end at the depot
Geocode each delivery address in column A using TomTom. Run TomTom waypoint optimization starting from the depot in cells B1 and C1 and returning to the same depot at the end. Write stop order into column B, leg distances in km into column C, and total round-trip distance in cell D1.
Full pre-departure report in one shot
Geocode each address in column A using TomTom. Optimize the visit order using TomTom waypoint optimization starting from the depot in B1. Write the optimized stop number, estimated arrival time, and leg distance into columns B, C, and D. Calculate the total route distance and write it in cell E1. Flag any address TomTom could not geocode in column F.
One prompt produces the complete dispatch-ready output.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook with your delivery stops, then ask it to optimize the route using TomTom. For submitting large batches of origin-destination pairs at once, see the batch routing spoke.