The Scenario
A proposal manager at a mid-size agency closes a project and the last step before archiving is always the same: get PDF copies of the final proposal docs into the client delivery folder so the account team can send them. The tracking sheet has 20 rows — column A holds the Google Doc URL for each finished proposal, column B is supposed to hold the PDF download link. Column B is blank. The account lead just posted in Slack asking if the PDFs are ready. They need them before their 3pm call.
The bad version:
- Open the first Google Doc URL from column A. Go to File > Download > PDF Document. Wait for it to download. Open Google Drive. Find the delivery folder. Upload the PDF. Right-click > Get link. Copy the link. Switch back to the sheet. Paste it into column B, row 2.
- Repeat that for all 20 rows. Don't lose your place. Don't accidentally paste the wrong link into the wrong row.
- Notice that rows 7 and 14 are the same doc — someone pasted a duplicate. Now you have two identical PDFs with different filenames in the delivery folder and you have to sort that out.
The 3pm call is in 90 minutes. You have 19 more rows to go.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your data and talks to the Google Docs and Drive APIs — it can export each doc as a PDF and write the download URL back into the sheet without you touching a single file.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this prompt:
For each Google Doc URL in column A of the Proposals tab, export the document as a PDF using Google Docs and write the PDF download link to column B.
What You Get
- Each Google Doc in column A is exported as a PDF via the Drive API.
- The PDF download URL is written to column B in the corresponding row.
- Any doc that can't be accessed (permissions issue, broken URL) gets a note in column C rather than a blank or a silent skip.
- Duplicate doc URLs across rows are each exported independently — if you want dedup first, add that to the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some URLs in column A are Google Doc edit links, some are share links, some are just the doc ID
Before exporting, normalize all values in column A to the canonical Google Doc URL format. Then export each as a PDF and write the download link to column B.
Rows 7 and 14 have the same doc URL — deduplicate before exporting
Check column A for duplicate URLs. For any duplicate, mark the second occurrence in column C as "Duplicate — skipped" and export only the first instance. Write the PDF download link to column B for all other rows.
I need the PDFs saved to a specific Drive folder, not just a download link
For each doc URL in column A of the Proposals tab, export the document as a PDF and save it to the Drive folder named "Client Deliveries Q2." Write the file's Drive share link to column B.
Deduplicate the doc URLs, skip any row where column D says "Draft," export the rest as PDFs, save to the delivery folder, and write the links back — all in one pass
In the Proposals tab, skip any row where column D says "Draft." Remove duplicate URLs from column A (mark extras in column C as "Duplicate — skipped"). For the remaining rows, export each Google Doc as a PDF, save to the "Client Deliveries Q2" Drive folder, and write the share link to column B.
Combining the filter, the dedup, and the export into one prompt means you get clean output without a second cleanup pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your proposals tracking sheet, then ask it to batch-export all 20 docs to PDF and log the links. For related tasks, see how to generate one doc per row or check the Google Docs integration hub.