The Scenario
You are a research analyst and your manager dropped 20 open-ended market research questions into a Google Sheet at 4 PM on a Wednesday. He needs answers — with citations — before the Thursday morning executive sync. Column A has the questions. Columns B and C are blank. There is no time to research each question sequentially.
The bad version:
- Open the first question, search for sources, read enough to formulate an answer, write the answer into column B, find a citation URL, paste it into column C.
- Move to question two, repeat. Twenty questions, forty fields, each requiring genuine research: at an optimistic pace, that is a three-hour evening.
- Submit an answer to question 11 that you are not confident about because you ran out of time.
The executive sync does not know you were handed the list at 4 PM. The answers just need to be right.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the questions and through its built-in Parallel integration submits all 20 as a task group, collects the structured answers and citations, and writes the results back into columns B and C.
Create a Parallel task group, run a research task for each of the 20 questions in column A, and write the answer into column B and the primary source URL into column C when all tasks complete.
What You Get
- Column B filled with a research-backed answer for each of the 20 questions.
- Column C containing the primary citation URL Parallel surfaced for each answer.
- All 20 results written back together once the task group completes, rather than row by row as each finishes.
- Any question Parallel could not fully resolve marked with a note in column B rather than left blank, so you know where to follow up.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some questions are duplicates or near-duplicates — you want to deduplicate before submitting
Before running the Parallel task group, check column A for duplicate or near-duplicate questions. For any question that is substantially the same as another row, mark the later row as Duplicate in column D and skip it in the task group. For all unique questions, run the research task and write the answer into column B and citation URL into column C.
Questions are in mixed languages and you want answers in English regardless of input language
Translate any non-English questions in column A to English and write the translated version into column E. Then create a Parallel task group using the translated questions from column E as input. Write the answer into column B and citation URL into column C for each row.
You want to run a second round of research on questions where the first answer lacked a citation
Run the Parallel task group on all 20 questions in column A, writing answers into column B and citation URLs into column C. After all tasks complete, identify rows where column C is blank. For those rows, run a second Parallel research task with the original question rephrased as "find a source for: [question]" and write the found source into column C.
You want research plus answer confidence scoring plus executive summary in one shot
Create a Parallel task group for all 20 questions in column A. Write the answer into column B and citation URL into column C. After all tasks complete, score the confidence of each answer as High (multiple consistent sources cited), Medium (single source), or Low (no citation or conflicting sources) and write the score into column D. Then write a 3-sentence executive summary of the full set of findings into cell F1.
The pattern: batch research, confidence scoring, and synthesis in one prompt — so what lands in column B is ready to present, not just raw answers.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a column of research questions, then ask it to run all of them through Parallel as a task group and collect answers and citations. You can also look at how to convert research objectives into Parallel task specs or return to the Parallel overview.