The Scenario
You are a project manager. A two-month sprint just closed and the retrospective is next Friday. You want to analyze what was actually said in the comment threads on the 60 project records in your Airtable base: who said what, when, and whether blockers were flagged early or only surfaced at the last minute.
The comments live in Airtable, attached to individual records. You cannot analyze them there — Airtable does not let you search or pivot comment content across 60 records at once.
The manual extraction path:
- You open record one, copy each comment into a sheet row by hand
- You record the commenter name, the comment text, and the timestamp
- 60 records × average 8 comments per record = 480 rows to copy manually
- By record 15 you have lost track of which record you are on
- By record 30 you start skipping comments to finish faster
- The retrospective analysis is based on roughly half the comments.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the record IDs, calls the Airtable comments API for each one, and writes every comment into the sheet as a flat log.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each record ID in column A, fetch all comments from my Airtable 'Projects' table and write the record name, commenter name, comment text, and timestamp into columns B, C, D, and E. Sort the results by timestamp ascending.
SheetXAI iterates through all 60 record IDs, calls the comments API for each, and writes the flat comment log into the sheet. 480 rows done without you copying a single comment by hand.
What You Get
A flat comment log ready for retrospective analysis:
- One row per comment — record name, commenter, text, timestamp
- All 60 records covered — no records skipped to save time
- Sorted by timestamp — you can see the conversation chronology across all projects
- The full text — no truncation, no "see record" links
Now you can pivot by commenter to see who was most active, filter for the word "blocker" to find where issues surfaced, or sort by timestamp to see which records went quiet in the final week.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Comment exports have their own edge cases. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When the record IDs in column A include stale records that were archived
Some IDs in the list belong to records archived mid-sprint. Archived records return an error from the comments API.
For each record ID in column A, attempt to fetch comments from the 'Projects' table. If a record returns an error (e.g., not found or archived), write "archived" in column B and skip that record. For all others, write the record name, commenter, comment text, and timestamp into columns B through E.
When you want only comments from the last 30 days of the sprint
The sprint ran for two months but the retrospective focuses on the final 30 days.
For each record ID in column A, fetch all comments from my Airtable 'Projects' table. Write only comments where the timestamp is on or after 2026-03-15. Include record name, commenter, comment text, and timestamp in columns B through E.
When you want a summary per record alongside the flat log
The flat log is useful, but you also want a one-row-per-record summary showing total comment count and last comment date.
Fetch all comments for each record ID in column A from the Airtable 'Projects' table. Write the full flat log into the Comments tab. In the Summary tab, write one row per record showing record name, total comment count, date of first comment, and date of last comment.
When you want the comment pull plus automated theme tagging in one prompt
The retro facilitator wants each comment tagged as "blocker," "progress," "question," or "decision" based on its content.
Fetch all comments for each record ID in column A from the Airtable 'Projects' table. For each comment, classify it as one of: blocker, progress update, question, or decision. Write record name, commenter, comment text, timestamp, and classification into columns B through F. Sort by record name, then timestamp ascending.
The pattern: instead of copying comments manually across 60 records, you give SheetXAI the ID list and get back a structured dataset ready for analysis.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with Airtable record IDs in column A, then ask it to pull and flatten the comment threads. The Airtable integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to export filtered Airtable records into a sheet or the Airtable in Google Sheets overview.