The Scenario
You are a commodity trader. Monday morning means the weekly price review. You have five commodities you track, Brent crude, copper, wheat, corn, and sugar, and every Monday you want the last five years of monthly average prices side-by-side in a Google Sheet with month-over-month percentage change columns next to each one.
What actually happens:
- You download a CSV for Brent crude from a data provider, paste it into column B
- You try to align the copper CSV dates to match, realize the date formats differ
- You add a month-over-month formula in column C, copy it down 60 rows
- You repeat the whole process for wheat, corn, and sugar
- You spend an hour on date alignment and formatting across five data sources
- Your Monday review starts an hour late and you have not looked at the actual price moves yet.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that fetches all five commodity series from Alpha Vantage, aligns the dates, and calculates the month-over-month changes in one pass.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch monthly prices for Brent crude, copper, wheat, corn, and sugar from Alpha Vantage for the last 5 years and arrange them side-by-side with dates in column A. For each commodity, add a month-over-month percentage change column immediately to the right of the price column.
SheetXAI calls the Alpha Vantage commodity endpoints, aligns all five series to the same monthly dates, writes the prices, and computes the percentage changes. Ten columns of data from one prompt.
What You Get
A complete commodity comparison table with ten columns:
- Column A — monthly dates (five years, 60 rows)
- Column B — Brent crude price, Column C — Brent MoM change
- Column D — copper price, Column E — copper MoM change
- Column F — wheat price, Column G — wheat MoM change
- Column H — corn price, Column I — corn MoM change
- Column J — sugar price, Column K — sugar MoM change
The dates align across all five series. If one commodity series has a missing month, SheetXAI flags it rather than shifting all the downstream rows.
Want the biggest monthly moves surfaced automatically? Add "highlight the top 5 absolute month-over-month changes across all five commodities in column L" to the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Commodity data comparisons have their own common issues. SheetXAI handles the edge cases inline.
When you want to add an annual average row at the bottom
The Monday review also needs to show the annual average price for each commodity for quick year-over-year context.
After writing the monthly commodity price table, add a row at the bottom of each calendar year showing the annual average price for each of the five commodities. Label these rows with the year.
When you want to normalize all five series to a common base
You want to compare the relative price trajectory of each commodity over five years, not the absolute price level.
After writing the monthly commodity table, add columns M through Q showing each commodity price indexed to 100 at the start of the period. This lets me compare trajectory without the different price scales.
When you want to flag commodities that are at multi-year highs
You need a quick signal when any commodity is at or near its five-year high.
For each commodity in the table, check whether the most recent monthly price is within 5% of the five-year high. If yes, write the commodity name into cell B65 under a "Near 5-Year High" header.
When you need the full analysis ready before a client call
You have fifteen minutes before a client call and need the commodity table, the month-over-month columns, the normalized trajectory chart data, and a two-paragraph market summary covering the biggest moves this month.
Fetch 5 years of monthly prices for Brent crude, copper, wheat, corn, and sugar from Alpha Vantage. Write the raw prices side-by-side with dates in column A. Add month-over-month change columns. Add normalized index columns starting at 100. Identify the two commodities with the largest absolute MoM moves this month and write a two-paragraph market summary into cell A70 describing the moves and their likely drivers based on the historical context.
The pattern: the data fetch, the calculation, and the written output all happen before the call starts.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet for commodity analysis, then ask it to pull Alpha Vantage commodity series and build the comparison table. The Alpha Vantage integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a macro economic dashboard or the Alpha Vantage in Google Sheets overview.