The Scenario
The project manager who set up this tracking system left three weeks ago. She had a sheet — somewhere — that showed each of the 8 engineers' time split across the four active projects for any given week. The client wants to see that breakdown again for last week, and you've inherited the problem.
You find the sheet. The structure is intact: column A has employee IDs, columns B through E are supposed to have hours per project. None of the data is current. The last run was six weeks ago.
You know DeskTime has the data. What you don't know is how long it's going to take to pull it for all 8 employees across 4 projects and get it into the right cells.
The bad version:
- You open DeskTime and navigate to project reports — you find that project-level filtering by employee requires going into each project individually
- You copy the hours for employee 1 out of project 1, paste, switch tabs, employee 1 project 2, paste, eight employees times four projects is thirty-two manual lookups
- On employee 5 you realize the time format changed mid-table and the last six entries need to be re-entered
The client meeting is Thursday. You have other things on fire.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the employee IDs already in your sheet, connects to DeskTime through its built-in integration, and maps project time per employee without you touching the DeskTime UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this:
For each employee ID listed in column A, fetch their DeskTime project hours for 2026-05-06 through 2026-05-12 and add project name and time spent to columns B and C
What You Get
- Column A: employee ID (as already in your sheet, unchanged)
- Column B: project name for each time entry
- Column C: hours and minutes tracked on that project for the week
- Multiple rows per employee if they worked across multiple projects
- Employees with zero tracked time for the period still appear, with an empty note in column B
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I want it pivoted — one row per employee, one column per project
For each employee ID in column A, fetch their DeskTime project hours for last week. Pivot the result so each unique project gets its own column. If an employee has no time on a project, leave the cell empty.
The employee IDs in my sheet are internal codes, not DeskTime IDs
Column A has our internal employee codes. Column F on the EmployeeMap tab maps internal code to DeskTime employee ID. For each row in this sheet, look up the DeskTime ID from EmployeeMap, then fetch that employee's project hours for 2026-05-06 through 2026-05-12 and write project name and hours into columns B and C.
I only want time logged against specific client-billable projects
For each employee ID in column A, fetch their DeskTime project hours for last week. Only include projects that appear in the BillableProjects tab (column A of that tab). Write project name and hours into columns B and C.
Pull hours, flag anyone over their weekly cap, and summarize by project
For each employee in column A, fetch their DeskTime project hours for 2026-05-06 through 2026-05-12. Write project name and hours into columns B and C. Flag any row where hours on a single project exceed 20 with "Over cap" in column D. Add a summary block below the last row showing total hours per project across all employees.
One request covers the data pull, the conditional flag, and the summary.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the sheet where your employee IDs live, then ask it to pull last week's DeskTime project time for each one. The DeskTime integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. You might also want to look at exporting project hours for invoicing or the DeskTime overview hub.