The Scenario
Someone on the data team has been maintaining a spec sheet — transformation name in column A, JavaScript function body in column B — for three weeks. Eight new event transformations are ready for peer review. The expectation is that they'll land in RudderStack as unpublished drafts by end of day so the review can start tomorrow morning.
The sheet has been the single source of truth for the whole process. Now someone has to manually bridge the gap between the sheet and the RudderStack dashboard.
The bad version:
- Open the RudderStack Transformations dashboard, click "New Transformation," type the name from column A, paste the function body from column B, click save.
- Repeat for all eight rows, switching between the browser tab with the sheet and the tab with RudderStack after every entry.
- Realize that transformation five had a trailing comma in the pasted code that only shows up as an error after you save — go back, fix it, re-save.
Eight transformations is a 25-minute job done manually. It also means eight opportunities to paste into the wrong field or skip a row. This is precisely the kind of task that shouldn't require a person.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the spec sheet you've already built and creates the RudderStack transformations through the API — no manual dashboard entry, no copy-pasting between tabs.
For every row in my sheet where column C is blank, create a draft RudderStack transformation using the name from column A and the JavaScript code from column B, and write the returned transformation ID and version ID to columns C and D.
What You Get
- A draft (unpublished) RudderStack transformation created for each qualifying row
- Column C: the transformation ID returned by RudderStack for each new entry
- Column D: the version ID of the initial draft version
- Rows where column C already has a value are skipped — no duplicate creates
- Any rows that fail (syntax error in the code, name conflict) get an error message in column C instead of an ID
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some function bodies have inconsistent indentation or mixed quote styles
Before creating anything, normalize the JavaScript code in column B — convert all single-quoted strings to double quotes and standardize indentation to 2 spaces. Then create an unpublished RudderStack transformation for each row using the cleaned name from column A and the normalized code from column B, and write the transformation ID to column C.
The name column has some blank rows mixed in
For each row between rows 2 and 50 where column A has a value and column C is blank, create a draft RudderStack transformation using the name in column A and the code in column B. Write the returned transformation ID to column C and the version ID to column D. Skip any row where column A is empty.
I want to create from two separate sheets — one for filtering transformations, one for enrichment transformations
Create an unpublished RudderStack transformation for each row in Sheet1 (columns A and B) and write the returned IDs to Sheet1 column C. Then do the same for each row in Sheet2 (columns A and B) and write to Sheet2 column C.
Clean up any formatting issues, validate that each function starts with "export function", create the drafts, and write a status to column E
For each row where column C is blank, check that the JavaScript in column B starts with "export function". If it does, create the draft RudderStack transformation using the name in column A and write the transformation ID to column C and version ID to column D, and 'created' to column E. If it doesn't, write 'INVALID — missing export function' to column E and skip that row.
The underlying pattern: combine the validation, the conditional logic, and the API write into one instruction so the spec sheet goes from draft to created without intermediate cleanup steps.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the spec sheet your data team is maintaining, then ask it to create the pending rows as RudderStack drafts. For next steps after the drafts are reviewed, see Bulk Update and Publish RudderStack Transformations From a Google Sheet and the full RudderStack Transformation overview.