The Scenario
You are the content lead for a marketing team. Campaign launch is tomorrow at 8 AM. You have 45 approved content entries sitting in draft in Contentful. Their entry IDs are listed in a Google Sheet—column A has the IDs, column B has the content title, column C has the approval status.
You need all 45 published tonight. Your content manager is about to open Contentful and start clicking through them one at a time.
The bad version of tonight:
- Your manager opens Contentful
- She searches for the first entry ID, opens the entry, clicks Publish, confirms
- She repeats this 45 times
- Around entry thirty she gets a browser timeout and has to log back in
- She loses track of which ones she has already published
- She publishes the same entry twice and skips one she thought she had done
- At 8 AM, thirty-nine of forty-five entries are live. The campaign is missing six posts.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the entry IDs and calls Contentful's publish action for each one, so you do not have to click through the UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Publish each Contentful entry whose ID is in column A of this sheet. Only publish rows where column C says "Approved."
SheetXAI reads the sheet, filters to approved rows, and calls the Contentful publish action for each entry ID. All 45 approved entries go live. The ones not marked Approved are skipped.
What You Get
45 Contentful entries published, with no manual clicking required:
- Status-filtered — only rows where column C is "Approved" get published
- All 45 covered — no skipped entries, no double-publishes
- Confirmation column — ask SheetXAI to write "Published" to column D for each entry it confirms, and you get a row-by-row record
The Approved filter is the safety valve. Entries still in review are not touched. If your approval workflow adds "Approved" to column C when an editor signs off, you can run this prompt any time and it will publish exactly the right set.
If some entries are already published and you only want to skip those, add that to the prompt and SheetXAI checks the current status before acting.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Approval sheets are rarely perfectly clean when a deadline arrives.
When approval status is inconsistent
Column C has "Approved," "approved," "APPROVED," and "Yes" all meaning the same thing.
Treat any value in column C that is a variation of "approved" or "yes" as approved. Publish the Contentful entry for each of those rows.
When some entry IDs are duplicated
The sheet was assembled from two editorial trackers and a few IDs appear twice.
Deduplicate rows by entry ID in column A. Then publish each unique entry where column C says "Approved."
When you want to publish only a specific content type
The sheet contains entries of multiple content types but you only want to publish the article entries tonight.
For each row where column C is "Approved," check the Contentful entry type in column D. Publish only the entries whose content type is article.
When entries need to be un-archived before they can be published
A handful of entries in the sheet were previously archived and cannot be published directly.
For each row where column C is "Approved," check whether the Contentful entry in column A is archived. If it is, unarchive it first, then publish it. If it is not archived, publish it directly. Write the result—"Published" or "Error"—to column E.
The pattern: approval status, deduplication, and content type filtering all happen in the same prompt as the publish action. You do not pre-clean the sheet; you tell SheetXAI what the rules are and it applies them inline.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any approval tracking sheet, then ask it to publish the approved entries in Contentful. The Contentful integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to schedule publish actions from a sheet or the Contentful in Google Sheets overview.