The Scenario
Your data team is planning a BI tool migration and the first step is an honest inventory of what's in Metabase. Specifically: everything tagged or titled with "revenue." Before you can consolidate or deprecate reports, you need to know what exists. The search results in Metabase's UI are paginated, unsortable, and have no export button.
The bad version:
- Type "revenue" into Metabase's search bar and start reading through the results — cards, dashboards, collections — page by page.
- Open a Google Sheet and begin copying names, types, and collection paths manually, one result at a time.
- Realize after 30 items that Metabase's search doesn't show last-modified dates in the results list, so you'd need to click into each item to get that field.
- Accept a partial, undated inventory and present it as complete.
The inventory you produce this way is the inventory you'll regret in six months when you're trying to figure out which "Revenue - Final v2 - FINAL" is the one people actually use.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It can run a Metabase search query and write every result — name, type, collection path, creator, last updated — into the sheet in a single pass.
Search Metabase for all objects matching the term 'revenue' and write each result's name, type, collection path, and last updated date into this sheet
What You Get
- One row per search result: name, type (card, dashboard, or collection), collection path, last updated date.
- The full path for each result — not just the immediate parent — so you can tell at a glance whether the "Revenue Summary" card lives in the Sales team's space or in the Legacy folder from 2022.
- Results are sorted by last updated date descending, so the actively maintained content rises to the top.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to search for two related terms at once
Search Metabase for cards and dashboards containing 'churn' in their name, then write the results into Sheet1 with ID, name, type, and creator, and flag in column E any item where the last updated date is more than 180 days ago
Two signals in one view: what exists, and what's been dormant long enough to be a migration candidate.
You need to cross-reference search results against a list of known IDs
Search Metabase for all objects matching 'MRR' and write name, type, ID, collection, and last updated into Sheet1. Then in column F check whether the item ID appears in the IDs listed in column A of Sheet2 and write YES or NO
Useful when you have a canonical list of reports that should exist and you want to verify that search is finding them — and not just surfacing aliases or duplicates.
You want the results deduplicated by name
Search Metabase for all objects matching 'revenue', write results into Sheet1 with name, type, collection, and last updated, then in Sheet2 write only the rows where the same name appears more than once — these are duplication candidates
The migration team gets the duplication report without having to eyeball a 90-row list.
Full search audit with dedup and age analysis in one shot
Search Metabase for all objects matching 'revenue', write all results into Sheet1 with name, type, collection path, creator, and last updated. In Sheet2 write any name that appears more than once across cards and dashboards. In Sheet3 write a summary: total results, breakdown by type, count of items last updated more than 180 days ago.
One prompt produces the working migration research doc. The team can triage in the sheet rather than in Metabase's search UI.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet you're using for your BI migration planning, then ask it to search Metabase and dump every matching report into the sheet. Also useful: auditing your full Metabase workspace inventory, and the hub overview on connecting Metabase to Google Sheets.