The Scenario
You manage a 200-property investment pipeline and you have been using Melo as your primary source for French real estate data. Last quarter you focused entirely on Greater Paris. This quarter the mandate expanded — the partners want to see coverage across Normandy and the Loire Valley too.
Before you can build any targeted Melo searches for those regions, you need to know which communes Melo actually indexes. You need a reference list.
The bad version:
- Navigate to the Melo interface, start typing commune names, and try to reconstruct the city index from autocomplete suggestions — one search at a time.
- Copy each result by hand into column A, then go back and look up the corresponding city ID because the export didn't include it.
- Spend 40 minutes building a list that is almost certainly incomplete because you can only see what you already thought to type.
Nobody hired you to reverse-engineer a platform's city index through a search bar. You are supposed to be scoping a regional expansion, and right now you are trapped doing data archaeology instead.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands the context, and through its Melo integration can fetch the complete city index directly — no manual search, no partial list.
Fetch all available Melo cities and write city name and ID into columns A and B of the Cities tab, then add a column C formula that flags cities containing 'Paris' or 'Versailles'
What You Get
- Every Melo-indexed city written into column A with the city name, column B with the city ID.
- Column C populated with a formula that flags any row where the city name contains "Paris" or "Versailles."
- The full list — not just the cities you already knew to search for.
- A clean reference tab you can filter by region, sort by name, or use as a lookup source for other sheets in the workbook.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The list came back but you need to filter it to a specific department
From the Melo cities list in the Cities tab, filter to only cities in Île-de-France departments (75, 77, 78, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95) and write the filtered list to a new tab called IDF-Cities with city name in column A, city ID in column B, and department number in column C
The city names have inconsistent accents and your VLOOKUP against another sheet is breaking
Look at the city names in the Cities tab column A and the target list in the Targets tab column A — normalize both lists to remove accent characters using a helper column D in each tab, then write a column E in the Targets tab that shows 'found' or 'missing' based on the normalized match
You need to join the city list against a second tab of budget assumptions
Fetch all Melo cities into the Cities tab, then for each city name that appears in column A of the Budget-Assumptions tab, copy its Melo city ID into column B of Budget-Assumptions so the two tabs are linked by a shared identifier
Pull the list, deduplicate it, flag the Île-de-France communes, and count how many unique departments are represented — all in one shot
Fetch all Melo cities, remove any duplicates by city ID, write the deduplicated list to the Cities tab with name in A and ID in B, add a column C formula that flags Île-de-France communes (department codes 75–95), and put the count of unique departments represented in cell E1
The pattern: ask for the cleanup logic and the data retrieval in the same prompt. SheetXAI handles both without a two-step sequence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet where you are building out a French real estate market map — ask it to pull the Melo city index and you will have a complete reference list in your sheet in seconds. Then try the spoke on exporting your saved Melo searches or the full Melo integration overview.