How to Use the AI Chat Agent in Google Sheets

This is part of our Complete Guide to AI in Google Sheets.

SheetMagic's formula functions handle repeatable, bulk work well. You write a prompt template, drag it down 500 rows, and walk away. But some spreadsheet tasks don't fit the formula mold.

You want to explore a dataset you've never seen before. You need to scrape 30 URLs and drop the results into specific columns. You want to reformat a sheet, add a chart, and sort by a particular column, all in one go. Describing that as a formula chain is awkward. Describing it in plain English is natural.

That's what the AI Chat Agent is for. It's a conversational sidebar that sits inside Google Sheets. You tell it what you want, it reads your data, and it acts on your sheet directly. No formulas, no copy-pasting between tabs, no coding.

When to Use Chat Agent vs. Formulas

The short version: formulas are your assembly line, the Chat Agent is your analyst on call.

Use formulas when you have a repeatable operation you want to apply across hundreds of rows. Write a product description for each item in column A. Translate column B into Spanish. Classify each row by sentiment. Formulas excel at this because you define the pattern once and scale it.

Use the Chat Agent when the task is one-off, multi-step, or easier to describe than to formulate. "Find the top 10 customers by revenue, highlight them in green, and create a bar chart." That's three operations that would require manual work or separate formulas. In the Chat Agent, it's one sentence.

They complement each other. A typical workflow might start with the Chat Agent to explore and clean data, then switch to formulas for the repeatable processing step.

Getting Started

Who Has Access

The AI Chat Agent is available on paid plans:

• Solo ($20/month)
• Team ($80/month)
• Business ($200/month)

It's not available on the free tier.

Opening the Sidebar

1. Open any Google Sheet with SheetMagic installed.
2. Go to Extensions > SheetMagic > Open AI Chat.
3. The sidebar appears on the right side of your sheet.

Type a message, hit send, and the agent responds. It automatically reads your active sheet's data (up to 25,000 cells) so it already knows your headers, data types, and contents before you ask anything.

Conversation history is preserved across messages within a session, so you can build on previous requests without re-explaining context.

What the Chat Agent Can Do

The agent has 50+ tools organized into four categories. Here's what each one does in practice.

Reading Data

Read operations execute automatically. This keeps the conversation fast when you're exploring.

• Read cells from any range
• Get sheet info (headers, row counts, data types)
• Get your current selection
• Filter data based on conditions

Example prompts:

• "What are the column headers in this sheet?"
• "How many rows have a value greater than 1000 in column C?"
• "Show me all rows where the Status column says 'Pending'"

Writing Data

Write operations execute automatically too. The agent tells you what it wrote and where, so you can undo with Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac) like any other edit.

• Write values to specific cells or ranges
• Insert or delete rows and columns
• Create formulas in cells
• Sort ranges by any column
• Format cells (bold, colors, number formats, freezing rows)
• Create charts from your data

Example prompts:

• "Add a SUM formula in B20 that totals B2:B19"
• "Insert a new column after C and label it 'Category'"
• "Sort the sheet by column D in descending order"
• "Bold row 1 and freeze it"

Web Scraping and Research

The agent can reach out to the web, which opens up research and data enrichment workflows that aren't possible with formulas alone.

• Scrape webpages (extracts up to 50,000 characters of content)
• Scrape images from URLs
• Search the web for current information
• Check domain availability and details

These use integration credits from your subscription, the same pool used by formula-based web features. Before any scrape that spends credits, the agent shows an approval card with the estimated cost and waits for you to confirm.

Example prompts:

• "Scrape the URL in A2 and extract the page title and meta description"
• "Search the web for the latest funding round of the company in A5"
• "Check if the domains listed in column A are available"

Media Generation

The agent can generate images, audio, and video without leaving the sidebar.

• Generate images via DALL-E 3
• Analyze images with an OpenAI vision model
• Generate speech from text
• Generate video via Sora

Example prompts:

• "Generate a product photo for the item described in A3"
• "Analyze the image at this URL and describe what's in it"
• "Create an audio narration of the text in B7"

The Confirmation Model

This is worth understanding clearly because it affects how you interact with the agent.

Sheet tools auto-execute. When the agent needs to read your data to answer a question, it does so immediately. When it writes cells, formats a range, or builds a chart, it does that immediately too and reports what changed. Sheet edits are reversible with undo.

Scrapes require confirmation. When the agent wants to run a scraper that spends integration credits, it pauses and shows you an approval card with what it plans to fetch and the estimated credit cost. You click to approve, or you reject and give it different instructions.

This design is intentional. Sheet edits are free and reversible. Scrapes cost credits. The confirmation step ensures the agent never spends your credits without your explicit approval, even if you gave a vague or ambiguous instruction.

Practical Workflows

Here's where the Chat Agent shows its real value: multi-step tasks where each step builds on the last.

Data Analysis and Visualization

You have a sheet with 200 rows of sales data. Columns include Date, Customer, Product, and Revenue.

You type: "Summarize the total revenue by customer, find the top 5 customers, and create a bar chart showing their revenue."

The agent reads your data, identifies the relevant columns, calculates totals, writes a summary to a new area of the sheet, and creates a chart. Three steps, one sentence.

Content Enrichment via Web Scraping

Column A has 20 URLs pointing to competitor landing pages. You want to pull the page title and meta description into columns B and C.

You type: "For each URL in column A, scrape the page and extract the meta title into column B and the meta description into column C."

The agent reads the URLs, asks you to confirm the scrape and its credit cost, scrapes each page, extracts the metadata, and writes the results to columns B and C. What would take 30 minutes of manual browser work finishes in a few messages.

Formatting and Organization

Your sheet is a raw data dump. No formatting, no frozen headers, unsorted.

You type: "Format row 1 as bold headers with a light gray background, freeze it, then sort the entire sheet by column D in descending order."

The agent applies each formatting change and the sort. The result is a clean, organized sheet from a single natural-language instruction.

Competitive Research

Column A has a list of 10 competitor company names. You want current pricing information.

You type: "Search the web for the current pricing of each competitor in column A and add their starting price to column B."

The agent searches for each company, extracts pricing data from the results, and writes it to column B. The data is as current as the web results, not limited to a training cutoff.

Chat Agent vs. Formulas

Neither replaces the other. A data analyst might use the Chat Agent to explore a new dataset, identify patterns, and build a chart. Then use AITEXT formulas to classify 2,000 rows based on what they learned during exploration.

Tips for Better Results

Be specific about what you want. "Analyze my data" is too vague. "Calculate the average revenue per customer in column D and list the top 10 by total revenue" gives the agent something concrete to act on.

Reference columns and ranges by name. The agent can see your headers. "Sort by the Revenue column" works better than "sort by the fourth column" because it's unambiguous.

Chain requests in one message. The agent handles multi-step instructions well. "Add a total row at the bottom, format it in bold, and create a pie chart of the category breakdown" is better than three separate messages because the agent can plan the steps together.

Let the agent read first. If you're not sure what's in the sheet, start with a question: "What columns does this sheet have?" or "Summarize the data in this sheet." The agent's response will help you formulate better follow-up requests.

Use it for what it's good at. Don't ask the Chat Agent to process 500 rows one by one. That's what formulas are for. Use the Chat Agent for the tasks that are hard to express as a formula: multi-step analysis, formatting, chart creation, web research, and exploratory work.

Limitations

25,000 cell cap. The agent reads up to 25,000 cells from your active sheet. For sheets larger than that, it loads as many rows as fit within the cap. If your data exceeds this, consider working with a filtered subset.

Paid plans only. The Chat Agent requires a Solo, Team, or Business subscription. Free tier users don't have access.

Token usage. Chat Agent conversations consume AI tokens from your subscription quota, the same pool used by formula functions. Complex conversations with many tool calls use more tokens than simple ones.

Integration credit usage. Web scraping and domain check tools consume integration credits, just like the equivalent formula features.

One sheet at a time. The agent sees your currently active sheet. It can't read across multiple sheets or workbooks in a single request.

Getting Started

If you're already on a paid SheetMagic plan, you have access right now:

1. Open any Google Sheet with SheetMagic installed.
2. Go to Extensions > SheetMagic > Open AI Chat.
3. Try a simple read: "What data is in this sheet?"
4. Try a write: "Add a header called 'Status' in column E."
5. Try a multi-step task: "Find the three highest values in column B, highlight those cells in green, and tell me what they have in common."

The Chat Agent is powered by Claude Sonnet 5 with tool-use capabilities. It's designed to handle practical spreadsheet tasks, not generate essays or hold philosophical conversations. Give it concrete instructions about your data and it works well.

Not on a paid plan yet? SheetMagic starts at $20/month for Solo. Install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace and upgrade to unlock the Chat Agent alongside the full formula library.

For the complete overview of everything AI can do inside Google Sheets, including formulas, batch processing, and BYOK setup, see The Complete Guide to AI in Google Sheets.