The Scenario
You coordinate deliveries for a regional logistics company. Every Monday you receive a fresh batch of 50 to 80 origin-destination pairs from the dispatch team — origin city in column A, destination city in column B — and your job is to attach a driving distance in kilometers and an estimated travel time in minutes to each row before drivers get their assignments.
Last week you did it by copying each city pair into Yandex Maps, reading the route result, and typing the numbers back into the workbook. Fifty pairs. About 90 minutes of work. You would rather spend those 90 minutes checking which routes have construction delays.
The bad version:
- Paste "Moscow" and "Tver" into Yandex Maps, read 165 km / 2 h 10 min, type 165 into column C and 130 into column D, go back to the workbook for row 2
- Midway through, realize you entered 310 for a Moscow-Yaroslavl route when the actual distance is 282 — you transposed two digits
- Finish the batch at 11:30 AM, only to receive a correction email at noon saying eight origin cities have changed
This is clerical work that compounds into real scheduling errors when you rush it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. Through the Yandex routing integration, it can calculate driving distance and travel time for each origin-destination pair in your workbook and write the results back — all at once, not one row at a time.
For each row with origin city in column A and destination city in column B, use Yandex routing to calculate the driving distance in kilometers and travel time in minutes. Write distance into column C and travel time into column D. Start at row 2 and process all non-empty rows.
What You Get
- Column C: driving distance in kilometers as a number
- Column D: estimated travel time in minutes as a number
- Rows where Yandex cannot resolve the city names get a note in column C so you know to check the input
- All 80 rows processed in a single pass — no manual lookup loop
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Origin or destination contains a typo or ambiguous city name
Yandex routing will fail silently or return a wrong result if the city name does not resolve cleanly. You want to catch those before drivers get wrong ETAs.
For each row in columns A and B, geocode the origin and destination city names using Yandex. Write the resolved canonical name back into columns A and B (overwrite if different). Then calculate driving distance and travel time for the resolved pairs and write results into columns C and D. Flag any row where geocoding failed with "Unresolved" in column C.
Mix of city-to-city and address-to-address rows
Some rows have full street addresses instead of city names. The routing call is the same but you want to handle both formats.
For each row in columns A and B, route using Yandex regardless of whether the value is a city name or a street address. Write driving distance into column C and travel time into column D. If either field in a row is empty, skip that row and leave columns C and D blank.
Only recalculate rows where column E is marked "Needs update"
The batch was partially processed last week. You only want to update the rows the dispatch team flagged.
Use Yandex routing only for rows where column E says "Needs update". Write driving distance into column C and travel time into column D for those rows only. Leave all other rows untouched.
Clean city names, calculate routes, and add a traffic-adjusted estimate column in one pass
Raw dispatch data sometimes has trailing spaces, inconsistent capitalization, or prefixes on city names that confuse the geocoder. You want clean inputs, route results, and a conservative estimate column that adds 20% to account for peak-hour traffic.
For each row in columns A and B, trim whitespace and normalize capitalization. Then route each cleaned pair using Yandex. Write driving distance into column C, base travel time in minutes into column D, and a traffic-adjusted estimate (base time times 1.2, rounded to the nearest minute) into column E. Start at row 2.
The traffic-adjusted column is what dispatch actually uses for driver scheduling. Getting it in the same pass saves a manual formula step.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook with your weekly origin-destination pairs, then ask it to calculate the full route batch and flag any city names it could not resolve. See also: reverse-geocoding coordinates and enriching company lists.