The Scenario
You manage the BI platform for a 200-person company, and leadership has asked you to make a case for which Metabase dashboards to prioritize for quarterly maintenance. The ask is simple: show which content is actually being used. But Metabase's native analytics are sparse — you can see a "popular items" list in the homepage, but you can't export it, sort it by your own criteria, or cross-reference it against the recent-views log in any structured way.
The bad version:
- Screenshot the Metabase popular items widget and paste it into a slide.
- Click through your own recently viewed history in Metabase, noting card names and dates into a spreadsheet row by row.
- Present an 8-item "popular" list and a 12-item "recent" list with no timestamps, no collection context, and no way for leadership to ask follow-up questions about the data.
The presentation goes fine. Three months later, someone asks which dashboards are actually being used and you realize the answer you gave was a screenshot from a widget you don't fully understand.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It can pull both the popular items list and the recent activity log from Metabase and write them into separate tabs of the sheet, timestamped and sortable.
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and my 20 most recently viewed items, then write them into Sheet1 labeled Popular and Sheet2 labeled Recent, each with columns for name, type, collection, and timestamp
What You Get
- Sheet1 (Popular): up to 5 items Metabase identifies as most viewed across all users, with name, type, collection path, and the view count or popularity signal Metabase exposes.
- Sheet2 (Recent): your 20 most recently viewed items, sorted by timestamp descending — name, type, collection, last viewed date.
- Both sheets have header rows.
- The data is live — not a screenshot from three weeks ago.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want recent views sorted with the oldest at the top to see what you haven't touched in a while
Get my Metabase recent views and write each item's name, type, collection, and last viewed timestamp into this sheet sorted by timestamp ascending
The items you haven't opened in the longest time surface at the top — useful for identifying archive candidates.
You want to cross-reference popular items against your inventory audit
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and write their IDs, names, types, and collections into Sheet1. Then check whether each item ID appears in the inventory list in column A of Sheet2 and write YES or NO in column E.
Useful when you've already run the workspace inventory audit and you want to know whether the popular items are properly documented.
You want a combined view with a single recency + popularity score
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and my 20 most recently viewed items. Write all unique items into Sheet1 with name, type, collection, and source (Popular, Recent, or Both) — deduplicate items that appear in both lists
A single prioritized list rather than two separate tabs. Items that appear in both popular and recent get flagged with "Both" so they rise to the top of the maintenance queue.
Full usage audit with summary in one shot
Fetch the 5 most popular Metabase items and my 20 most recently viewed items. Write popular items into Sheet1 and recent items into Sheet2 with name, type, collection, and timestamp. In Sheet3 write a summary: total unique items across both lists, count by type (card vs dashboard), and any items that appear in both lists
One prompt, three sheets, a usage picture leadership can actually act on.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet you're using for your quarterly BI maintenance planning, then ask it to pull your Metabase popular and recent views into the sheet before the meeting. Also useful: auditing your full Metabase workspace inventory, and the hub overview on connecting Metabase to Google Sheets.