The Scenario
You are a customer success manager. You exported 150 support ticket summaries from Zendesk into a Google Sheet at the end of Q2. Columns are TicketID and Summary. The research team asked you to get them into Dovetail so they can start tagging sentiment and themes.
They asked last Friday. It is now Tuesday at 11 AM and you have not started.
The bad version of Tuesday morning:
- Create the Dovetail channel manually
- Open row one, copy the Summary, paste it into Dovetail as a data point
- Type the TicketID as the label, save
- Go back to the sheet, row two
- Repeat for 150 rows
- By row thirty you are checking your phone every five minutes
- At row fifty you decide to "do the rest later" and later never comes.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that creates the Dovetail channel and imports all 150 data points, so you do not have to touch the Dovetail UI once.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a new Dovetail channel called 'Support Tickets Q2'. Then read each row from the Ticket Summaries sheet (columns: TicketID, Summary) and create one data point per row in that channel, using the Summary as content and the TicketID as the label.
SheetXAI creates the channel first, then iterates through all 150 rows, importing each ticket summary as a separate data point. When it finishes, the channel is populated and the research team can start their analysis.
What You Get
A fully seeded Dovetail channel, ready for research:
- Channel name — "Support Tickets Q2"
- 150 data points — one per ticket, with the summary as content and the TicketID as label
- Channel ready for tagging — the research team can start immediately
Creating the channel and importing in one prompt is the key. If you had to create the channel manually first, you would still have the 150-row paste job ahead of you. SheetXAI does both in sequence without stopping.
If the research team later wants to pull a second batch — Q3 tickets — you give SheetXAI the same shape of prompt with a new channel name and a new sheet. No setup, no reconfiguration.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Support ticket exports are inconsistent. Some summaries are one sentence, some are a paragraph, some have agent notes mixed in. SheetXAI handles the cleanup before the import.
When ticket summaries include agent notes
The export has agent commentary appended to the customer's own description. You only want the customer's words in Dovetail.
For each row in the Ticket Summaries sheet, extract only the customer-facing portion of the Summary (before any line that starts with "Agent note:" or "Internal:"). Write the cleaned text into column C. Then create a Dovetail channel called 'Support Tickets Q2' and import each cleaned summary as a data point.
When some summaries are blank
A handful of rows have blank Summary columns from tickets that were closed without resolution notes. You do not want empty data points.
For each row in the Ticket Summaries sheet where Summary is blank, skip the Dovetail import and write "SKIPPED — no summary" into column C. For all other rows, create a data point in the 'Support Tickets Q2' channel.
When tickets should be split into two channels by category
The export has a Category column. The research team wants "Billing" tickets in one Dovetail channel and "Usability" tickets in another.
Read the Ticket Summaries sheet. For rows where Category is "Billing," create data points in a Dovetail channel called 'Billing Issues Q2.' For rows where Category is "Usability," create data points in a channel called 'Usability Issues Q2.' Skip all other categories and write "SKIPPED — category not mapped" into column D.
When the volume is large and you want a progress log
You have 400 rows, not 150, and you want to know how many were created successfully.
Import each row from the Ticket Summaries sheet as a data point in the 'Support Tickets Q2' Dovetail channel. After each successful creation, write "CREATED" and the Dovetail data point ID into column C. After each failure, write "FAILED" and the error reason into column C. After all rows are processed, write a summary count at the top of column D showing total created and total failed.
The pattern: seed the channel, handle edge cases, track what happened — all in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with customer feedback, support tickets, or bulk qualitative data, then ask it to seed a Dovetail channel. The Dovetail integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk import interview notes into Dovetail or the Dovetail in Google Sheets overview.