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Autofill in MS Excel

(For Microsoft365 Users)

Your teams spend significant time filling out vendor assessment questionnaires. They have to craft answers one at a time, working through hundreds of questions, often taking days before the first draft is ready for review.

SiftHub's Autofill for MS Excel cuts that time down to minutes by letting you generate answers for multiple questions simultaneously. Simply select all relevant question cells, click Autofill, and watch as SiftHub automatically populates intelligent, contextual responses across your entire sheet in seconds. What used to take days can now be completed in a single batch operation.

 

Prerequisites to Autofill

To leverage SiftHub’s Autofill feature in MS Excel across Browser and Desktop versions, you need to -

  • Install and activate the SiftHub MS Add-in
  • Ensure sufficient company knowledge is connected to SiftHub, since it will be used as a source for the Autofill. This can be in the form of uploaded Documents, Q&As or files from your connected apps such as SharePoint.

How to Autofill a questionnaire in MS Excel

Steps

1. Highlight the set of question cells that you wish to Autofill.

  • You can highlight a few cells, or the entire column.
  • SiftHub will process up to 500 questions in one autofill run. However, you can trigger multiple autofill runs of 500 rows each at the same time
  • SiftHub will auto-detect questions from the selection, while ignoring the rest of the cells (such as sections, instructions, etc). So you can highlight all cells at once

2. Click on Autofill icon in the SiftHub Add-in, from the ribbon menu of MS Excel.

3. In the Autofill modal that opens up:

  • Confirm that the Selected cells is showing the correct selection
  • Keep the "Auto detect questions" toggle on. This will allow SiftHub to detect and shortlist the questions (from the sections, headers, instructions etc) and only respond to them. This will also allow SiftHub to read additional context from the neighbouring cells (such as sections comments, guides and instructions) that can help formulating a better response.
  • Add instruction prompts to customize the formatting and content used for each Autofilled answer. These are similar to the Instruction Prompts used in 'Generate Answer' from the Browser Extension, except that they will apply to each answer that is autofilled in the activity.
  • Configure the Autofill Settings for your activity,
  • Click Autofill.

4. SiftHub automatically detects all questions as well as neighbouring context from the spreadsheet and for each cell corresponding to a detected question, the top answer option starts getting populated in the designated answer column.

  • Answers that fully address the question asked are autofilled with normal rich text formatting
  • For partial answers, the response is autofilled with a yellow text highlight color in the cell to inform users to check the answer.
  • Answers for which no information was found have the cell color highlighted in red to indicate that they need to fill a response there.

Note: Support for markdown elements in the autofilled response is not available in MS Excel files currently.

The answers are autofilled one at a time, and you can track the progress of the Autofill activity in the "Activity Center" in the Browser Extension. 

Note: Please keep the MS Add-in open while the Excel spreadsheet is being Autofilled. The Autofill process will resume if you close the MS Add-in and reopen it later. You can navigate away from the Excel tab in your Browser or the Desktop version and SiftHub will continue to Autofill it in the background.

 

Review Autofill Answer

As the answers are being Autofilled in the sheet, you can start reviewing them in the Copilot -> Answer tab of the MS Add-in. From here, you can verify its sources, view alternate answers and matched Q&As, modify answer, regenerate with instruction prompts and more.

To review the answer, select the autofilled answer cell (or its corresponding question) and click on "Review" from the SiftHub Add-in ribbon menu

After reviewing the answer and making the necessary modifications, you can copy it back into the same cell

 

Autofill Settings

To configure the Autofill settings for your run, click on the Settings (Gear) icon next to the Autofill button in the modal -

Autofill settings are similar to Generate answer settings which allow the user to set the language of the Autofill run, or set the Generation Mode as:

  • Concise
  • Standard
  • Comprehensive

Changing an Generate Answer Settings in the Answer tab of the Browser Extension will not impact the Autofill Answer settings, and vice versa. However, once you have changed the Autofill settings for a specific document Autofill, it will remain applied for all subsequent Autofill runs in the same document, and will automatically reset when you try Autofill a new document.