The Scenario
You are a VP of Marketing. The annual board deck is due in four days. Slide 12 is the email marketing performance overview — monthly open rates, click rates, and bounce rates for this year versus last year.
The data is in ActiveTrail's executive report. You have 12 months of it this year and 12 months of it last year. You need a clean dashboard in Google Sheets with a chart comparing the two years, and it needs to be finished before the design team takes over the deck on Thursday.
The slow version:
- You log into ActiveTrail and look for the executive report — it is in a section you rarely visit
- The UI shows the current year only, no year-over-year view
- You export this year's data — a CSV
- You find last year's report somewhere in the same section, export that separately
- You open both CSVs, figure out how to align the monthly columns, build the comparison table
- You build a chart — it is wrong because one year has 12 rows and the other has 11 because December was a partial month
- It is Thursday. The design team is waiting. You are still in the chart editor.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that pulls ActiveTrail's executive report for both years and builds the comparison view in one go — no dual exports, no manual alignment.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for the last 12 months and write each month's sent count, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate to this sheet in the This Year tab. Then pull the same report for the 12 months before that and write it to the Last Year tab. On the Comparison tab, write a side-by-side table of open rate, click rate, and bounce rate by month for both years.
SheetXAI fetches both year's executive data, writes them to the respective tabs, and builds the comparison table. Add a follow-up prompt to create the chart and it is done before Thursday.
What You Get
A year-over-year email performance dashboard for the board deck:
- This Year tab — 12 months of sent count, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate
- Last Year tab — same structure for the prior 12 months
- Comparison tab — side-by-side monthly view of the key metrics for both years
The chart is based on aligned data. If one year has a partial month at the end, SheetXAI handles the alignment so the chart does not misrepresent the comparison.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Executive report data often needs additional shaping for board-level presentation. SheetXAI handles it in the same prompt.
When you want the comparison chart built inline
You do not want to build the chart yourself — you want it ready.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for this year and last year. Write monthly open rate, click rate, and bounce rate for both years to the Comparison tab, aligned by month. Then create a line chart on the Comparison tab with three lines: this year's open rate, last year's open rate, and this year's click rate. Label the chart "Email Performance: Year over Year."
When you want percentage change columns instead of raw numbers
The board wants to see whether metrics improved, not just the raw numbers.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for this year and last year. On the Comparison tab, write monthly open rate for both years, then add a column showing the percentage change from last year to this year for each month. Flag months where open rate declined by more than 2 percentage points.
When you want to highlight the best and worst months for each metric
The board presentation needs a "what worked" and "what did not" callout for each metric.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for this year. Identify the month with the highest open rate, the month with the highest click rate, and the month with the highest bounce rate. Also identify the worst month for each. Write the full 12-month table to this sheet, then add a summary block above the table calling out the best and worst month for each key metric.
When you want the full board-ready dashboard — two years of data, comparison table, chart, and executive summary in one prompt
The board deck needs the slide ready, not a draft.
Pull the ActiveTrail executive report for the last 12 months and the 12 months before that. Write the raw data to separate tabs. Build a comparison table on the Summary tab with monthly open rate, click rate, and bounce rate for both years, plus a percentage change column for each metric. Create a line chart showing open rate trends for both years. In cell A1 of the Summary tab, write a 2-sentence executive summary comparing this year's average open rate and click rate to last year's.
The pattern: instead of two separate exports and a manual comparison build, you describe the dashboard you need for the board and SheetXAI builds it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet, then ask it to pull your ActiveTrail executive performance report. The ActiveTrail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull SMS campaign performance data or the ActiveTrail in Google Sheets overview.