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Autofill in Google Sheets

(For Google Workspace 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 Google Sheets 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 autofill a Google Sheet, ensure that the following requirements are met -

  • The SiftHub Browser Extension is installed and you are logged in with your SiftHub credentials.
  • Sufficient company knowledge is connected to SiftHub, since it will be used as a source for autofill. This can be in the form of uploaded Documents, Q&As or files from your connected apps such as Google Drive.
  • SiftHub has read and write access to the Google Sheet which needs to be autofilled. The steps for the same are listed here.

  • The Google Sheet you want to Autofill is hosted on your 'My Drive' (or move it to 'My Drive'). This is because your organization’s Shared Drives configuration may restrict users from providing external access to files in the Shared Drive.

    You can verify if the location of the Google Sheet you want to Autofill is in your My Drive by clicking on “File” in the toolbar on Google Sheets, clicking “Details” from the menu and checking the Location in the Document Details modal that pops up.

    Alternatively, if your organization has granted SiftHub's service account access to designated folders or Shared Drives (recommended), then you can Autofill the file at its original location directly.

  • For an Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx file type) that you open from Google Drive, ensure to convert it to a Google Sheet before continuing to Autofill selected cell(s) from the Floating Widget. You can do this by clicking on “File” in the Google Sheets toolbar, and clicking “Save as Google Sheets” from the menu.

 

How to Autofill a Google Sheet questionnaire

When SiftHub detects that your cursor is active in a Google Sheet, the Autofill icon is automatically displayed in the Floating Widget and the Projects tab in Browser Extension.

 

Steps to Autofill

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 question rows 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 Floating Widget or "Autofill" in the Project tab of the Browser Extension (if no Project is created)

  • When you click on the Autofill icon from the Floating Widget in Browser Extension, a modal pops up that lets you either Create a Project or do this later and continue without creating a Project.



    You can read through the benefits of creating a Project for your questionnaires or RFPs.
    Also review the Autofill Settings for a Project to learn more about available configurations while populating generated answers in the primary document linked with your Project.
     

3. Grant access of the Sheet to SiftHub, if not already done so. Here are the steps.

 

4. In the Autofill modal that opens up:


  • Confirm that the Selected cells is showing the correct selection
  • Select your Answer Column from the dropdown (columns A-Z)
  • Choose the Answer Type (Text or Dropdown):
    • Text: For descriptive answers
    • Dropdown: For structured responses like Yes/No or Compliant/Non-compliant
  • For complex questionnaires requiring both types of answers, click "+ Add column" to select a secondary column and its answer type. Learn more about multi-column and dropdown support
  • 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.

5. 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.

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. 

 

Enhanced Autofill with Multi-Column and Dropdown Support

SiftHub's Autofill supports populating multiple columns and answering questions that require dropdown selections. This is particularly useful for questionnaires that require both descriptive 'Text' answers and structured 'Dropdown' responses like Yes/No or Compliant/Non-compliant.

 

 

Multi-Column Support

  • Autofill up to 2 columns simultaneously in a single run
  • No additional transactions consumed for multi-column autofill

Answer Types

SiftHub offers two answer types:

  • Text Answers: Populates AI-generated descriptive responses, incorporating context from your autofill instructions
  • Dropdown Answers: Automatically selects appropriate values from cells' dropdown options or column headers, defaulting to text if none exist. Users don't need to specify the values manually.

 

 

Review Autofill Answer

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

Here is how to review the answer:

  1. Select the autofilled answer cell (or its corresponding question) and click on "Review Autofill Answer" from the cell shortcut action button shown on the corner of your selected cell.

     
  2. Select the autofilled answer cell (or its corresponding question) and click on "Review Autofill Answer" from the Floating Widget on your screen, placed at the bottom right by default.

 

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

̌When reviewing an answer with dropdown answer type, or in case of multi-column autofill, you'll see both the selected dropdown value (e.g., Yes/No or Compliant/Non-compliant) and the descriptive answer that supports this selection.

 

Note: Review Autofill answer button and cell shortcut will always be visible in the Floating Widget within documents or spreadsheets where at least one Autofill run was previously triggered.

Source Filters

Select your company knowledge used for response generation from among your connected Sources. Set Collections or Document tags to segregate the connected Sources further.

To filter the sources for your spreadsheet or Document, click on Source Filter icon on the bottom left of the Autofill modal



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

Autofill Settings

To configure the response generation for your Autofill run, click on the Answer 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.

 

Granting edit access of the Google Sheet to SiftHub

SiftHub needs read and write access to the Google Sheet it has to autofill to read its contents and edit the sheet programmatically

Therefore, when an Autofill in Google Sheets is triggered, a pre-modal is shown with steps to complete a one-time setup and provide the SiftHub email address with the required access.

Steps:

1. Copy the SiftHub email address from the modal to your clipboard and click “Share” in the top right corner of the Google Sheet.



 

2. In the modal that pops up when you click “Share” within the Google Sheet, paste the SiftHub service email address copied to your clipboard and provide it Editor access to the Sheet

Note: Ensure to complete the access setup before you click “Continue” to avoid issues arising due to insufficient permissions granted for Autofilling the Sheet.