The Scenario
You're setting up a new product analytics workspace in Metabase for a team that just shipped a feature. The plan: four collections (Acquisition, Engagement, Retention, Revenue) and eight dashboards distributed across them — two per collection. You have the full structure mapped in a Google Sheet. You know what to create. You're just not looking forward to clicking through Metabase's UI eight times for dashboards and four times for collections.
The bad version:
- Open Metabase, navigate to New Collection, type the name, add the description, save.
- Repeat for the remaining three collections.
- Navigate to New Dashboard, type the name, select the target collection, save.
- Repeat for the remaining seven dashboards.
- Realize you put one dashboard in the wrong collection because the dropdown didn't scroll properly, and go back to move it.
Twelve clicks sequences, one mis-click, one cleanup. The work of an afternoon compressed into a paragraph, but it still takes 20 minutes of your actual life.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It can read collection names and dashboard names from the sheet and create them all in Metabase in one pass — writing the new IDs back into the sheet as it goes.
For each row in Sheet1 (collection name in column A, description in column B), create a Metabase collection and write the new collection ID into column C
What You Get
- One Metabase collection created per row in Sheet1.
- The collection name comes from column A, the description from column B.
- The new collection ID lands in column C for each row — you'll use these IDs in the next prompt to assign dashboards to their parent collections.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You're ready to create the dashboards now that you have collection IDs
Read dashboard names from column A and target collection IDs from column B of Sheet2, create each dashboard in Metabase, and write the new dashboard ID and URL into columns C and D
The collection IDs written by the previous prompt feed directly into this one. Two prompts, full workspace structure created.
You want to create nested collections (subcollections under a parent)
For each row in this sheet with a parent collection ID in column C, create a Metabase subcollection using the name in column A and description in column B, nested under the parent collection in column C. Write the new subcollection ID into column D.
Hierarchical workspace structures — Teams > Product > Analytics — created from a flat sheet with a parent ID column.
Some dashboards already exist and you want to skip those rows
For each row in Sheet2, check whether a Metabase dashboard with the name in column A already exists in collection ID in column B. If it does not exist, create it and write the new ID into column C. If it already exists, write ALREADY EXISTS in column C.
Idempotent scaffolding — safe to run more than once without creating duplicates.
Full workspace setup in one shot
Create Metabase collections for each row in Sheet1 (name in column A, description in column B) and write new IDs into column C. Then create dashboards for each row in Sheet2 (name in column A, target collection ID in column B from the IDs just written) and write new dashboard ID and URL into columns C and D. In Sheet3 write a summary: collections created, dashboards created, any failures.
One prompt sequence creates the full workspace. The summary tab gives you the confirmation receipt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet where you've mapped your new Metabase workspace structure, then ask it to create the collections and dashboards in one pass. Also useful: bulk-creating Metabase saved questions from a sheet, and the hub overview on connecting Metabase to Google Sheets.