How to Connect Planly to Google Sheets (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Planly

You have a Google Sheet full of scheduled post data — captions, channel names, publish dates, asset URLs. You need it pushed into Planly for scheduling, or pulled back out after a campaign ends, in a way that doesn't involve a full afternoon of copy-pasting and tab-switching every single time.

Planly is good at managing social media publishing across multiple platforms and teams. But the path between your spreadsheet and Planly's content calendar is almost entirely manual. The usual flow involves exporting a CSV if Planly offers it, massaging the columns into your sheet's format, then re-importing or manually recreating posts on the other side.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default. You open Planly, find the posts or team data you need, and start transcribing: caption text, scheduled date, channel, status — one row at a time. If you're reviewing a client calendar, you're toggling between Planly and your sheet, building the review doc by hand.

It works fine the first time. The second time it's tedious. By the third week, when the client wants updates every Friday and you're rebuilding the same 30-row table from scratch, you start wondering if there's a better job out there.

For media assets, it's even worse. You open the Planly media library, look at file names, note the types, scroll through upload dates — none of which is selectable or copyable in any useful way — and you type it all in by hand.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Both have Planly connector options, or you can hit the Planly API through a generic HTTP module. The idea: trigger on a schedule or a sheet change, pull the relevant posts from Planly, write each one back to the sheet.

Before you go further — a quick check. Are you comfortable with triggers, field mapping, and API authentication? Do you know what a webhook endpoint is? Have you mapped JSON responses to spreadsheet columns before? If those questions made you pause, this path probably isn't for you. Skip to Method 3 or 4 — you'll get there faster.

If you're still here: the setup is real work. You pick the right trigger, authenticate to Planly, handle pagination if you're pulling more than a page of posts, map every field to a column, and test the thing until it stops dropping rows.

Once it runs, it runs one row at a time.

That's the structural ceiling. If you want to summarize posts across channels, aggregate by status, or filter to just the content for one client team, you're doing that logic in another tool — or not doing it at all.

You probably just need the content calendar data. You probably have no idea how to wire a paginated API call through Make's HTTP module. So you push it to whoever builds these on your team, and now you're two Slack threads deep waiting for something that should've taken fifteen minutes.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable spreadsheet ↔ Planly workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings and save templates. You'd define your range, tag your fields, save the config, and run it.

That was a real step up from copy-paste. Configs were reusable, output was consistent, the team didn't have to redo the column mapping every time.

But you were still responsible for every decision: which fields to pull, how to handle missing captions, what to do when Planly's schema changed. The tool moved the data. The thinking was still on you. And when a new team got added to your Planly account or a column got renamed, the config broke and sat there quietly failing until someone noticed.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Google Sheets

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands the structure you're working with, and through its built-in Planly integration it can push to or pull from Planly on request. No template configuration, no automation plumbing, no manual column mapping. You just ask.

Example 1: Export this week's scheduled posts for client review

List all Planly schedule groups for my team filtered to the next 30 days and write each post's scheduled date, channel name, social network, status, and caption into columns A–E of the 'Content Calendar' sheet

Each post lands as its own row. Columns land in the right place. If a post is missing a caption, the cell says so — it doesn't silently skip the row.

Example 2: Cross-team channel audit in one pass

List all teams in my Planly account and for each team write the team name plus all connected channels (channel name, social network, status) into this sheet — one row per channel, flag any non-active channels in column E

The pattern: instead of navigating team by team in the Planly UI, you describe the output you need and SheetXAI handles the iteration, the joins, and the flagging in one prompt.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet where you're tracking social content or Planly team data, then ask it to do one of the tasks above. The Planly integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.