The Scenario
The request came in from a colleague who has since moved to a different team. They left behind a Google Sheet with 50 URLs in column A — all dynamically rendered single-page applications. The column B header says "Raw HTML." The note at the top of the sheet says "for the parsing scripts."
The parsing scripts are ready. The HTML is not in the sheet. You are now the person responsible for getting it there.
The bad version:
- Open URL 1, right-click, "View Page Source" — but this is a JavaScript-rendered SPA, so the page source shows the pre-render shell, not the actual DOM that the parsing scripts expect
- Try "Inspect Element" instead, manually copy the rendered DOM tree — it is 4,000 lines and pasting it into a spreadsheet cell does not go well
- Consider writing a Puppeteer script to capture the rendered HTML but realize you are now two hours into something that should have taken five minutes
This is a handoff. The data should already be there.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads column A, understands that column B is the output target, and through its built-in ZenRows integration — with JavaScript rendering enabled — it can fetch the fully rendered HTML of each SPA page and write it into column B.
For each URL in column A, use ZenRows with JavaScript rendering enabled to fetch the full HTML and write it into column B
What You Get
- Column B: the fully rendered HTML of each page after JavaScript execution, ready for downstream parsing
- ZenRows waits for the JavaScript to execute before capturing, so the DOM reflects the actual rendered state
- Rows where ZenRows cannot reach the page or times out get an error note in column B
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some pages take longer to render because they load data asynchronously
For each URL in column A, use ZenRows with JavaScript rendering and a 5-second render wait to ensure async data has loaded before capturing — write the full HTML into column B
You only want the HTML for pages that are not already populated in column B
For each row in column A where column B is empty, use ZenRows with JavaScript rendering to fetch the full rendered HTML and write it into column B — leave rows that already have data untouched
Some URLs are static pages and do not need JavaScript rendering — you want to skip the overhead
For each URL in column A, check if column C is marked "dynamic" — if so, use ZenRows with JavaScript rendering and write the HTML into column B — for rows marked "static," use standard scraping without the rendering overhead
Full archival pass — fetch HTML, record capture timestamp, and flag pages that returned less than 1KB
For each URL in column A, fetch the fully rendered HTML with ZenRows into column B, write the capture timestamp into column C, calculate the byte length of the HTML and write it into column D, and flag any row with fewer than 1,024 bytes as "suspected error" in column E
One prompt. The rendering-aware fetch, the size check, and the error flagging.
Try It
Open a Google Sheet with your SPA URLs in column A and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI. Ask it to fetch the rendered HTML for each page into column B. For capturing screenshots instead of raw HTML, see the screenshot capture spoke.