The same shape all the way through
Every wire carries the one thing: rows with named columns. That is why any block can be plugged into any other without you thinking about types.
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Automations
Snap a few blocks together on a canvas and a page turns into rows on your terms: your selectors, your filters, your column names. No AI involved, nothing sent anywhere, nothing to pay.
The idea
Blocks on a canvas, wires between them
An automation is a small diagram. Blocks sit wherever you drop them, and the wires say where data flows. When it runs, SheetPilot follows those wires from the input blocks through to the sheet blocks and writes whatever comes out the end.
More than one ending is allowed
A diagram can finish in several sheet blocks — links into one spreadsheet, images into another. Each ending keeps its own header and duplicate settings.
Loops are refused, not half-run
If a wire would close a circle, the editor says so and the run never starts. You will not find a spreadsheet holding the first half of an automation.
The only joining rule there is
When two or more wires arrive at the same block, their rows are set side by side as extra columns, matched by row number. Titles from one wire, links from another, dates from a third: three wires into a sheet block give you three columns. There is no merge block to learn, because there is nothing else to decide.
If the wires bring different numbers of rows, the shorter ones are padded with blanks and the editor flags the mismatch — you find out on the canvas, not afterwards in your spreadsheet.
Input
Input
Save to sheet
AB
The blocks
Seven kinds, and that is the whole vocabulary
Input
Where data enters the diagram. Choose one of seven sources and give the column it produces a name.
Find
Pulls email addresses, web addresses, numbers or a regular-expression match out of a column's text. One cell holding five links becomes five rows.
Filter
Drop duplicates, drop empty rows, keep or discard rows by the text they contain or a pattern they match, or cut the list down to the first few.
Transform
Tidy the whitespace, change case, find and replace, shorten to a length, or stick text before or after every value in a column.
Split
Break a cell on a separator — either into extra rows, or into named columns lined up beside it.
Add column
Stamp every row with the page address, the page title, the date, the time, or a line of your own that mixes them.
Save to sheet
The ending. Pick the spreadsheet and the tab, decide whether the column names are written as a header the first time, and choose which column to check before adding a duplicate.
Input sources: whatever you right-clicked · the current selection · the page's readable text · everything matching a CSS selector, as text or as an attribute such as a link's address · every link on the page · every image · the page's first table, header included.
Three ways to set one off
An automation you have to go looking for is one you stop using, so there are three ways to fire it.
From the panel
Open the Auto tab and press Run. It works on whichever page is in front of you, and reports how many rows it added.
From the right-click menu
Switch the menu option on and the automation appears exactly where you want it — on selected text, links, images, or the page itself.
With a keyboard shortcut
Three shortcut slots are available. Claim one for the automation you run most and it fires without any interface at all.
Preview before anything is written
Preview runs the whole diagram against the current page and writes nothing. Every block reports how many rows came out of it, with a few sample values. When the result is empty, you can see precisely which block emptied it — nine times out of ten a selector that needs one more class on the end.
Templates
Start from something that already runs
An empty canvas is a poor place to begin. Five ready-made diagrams cover the usual shapes — open one and change the parts that matter to you.
Collect links
Every link on the page, de-duplicated, with the source page and the date attached to each row.
Collect emails
The same shape for email addresses. One pass over a directory or contact page and you have a clean list.
Scrape a list
One row per element matching a CSS selector. Fill in the selector and it works on any repeated card, row or item.
Clip with right-click
Saves whatever you right-clicked along with the page title, address and date, and puts itself in the context menu from the moment you save it.
Two columns side by side
Two selectors, two wires into the same block. This is the template that shows what the joining rule does, and the one to copy when you need a title and its link together.
Worked example
Thirty job cards into a tracker
A job board shows thirty cards on one screen and you want the title of each one and the link behind it.
Tomorrow, same board, same shortcut: only the postings you have not seen yet get added to the sheet.
- 1
Start from the two-columns template. Put the card's title selector in the first input block, and the card's link selector in the second — with the link address chosen as its attribute rather than the text.
- 2
Press Preview. If both blocks report thirty rows, your selectors are right. If one says zero, it is too specific; if one says three hundred, it is too broad.
- 3
Add a Filter that drops empty rows, and an Add column block stamping the date, so you always know when a batch was captured.
- 4
Point the sheet block at your tracker, turn the header option on, choose the link column for duplicate checking, and run it.
Limits, and habits worth having
- Up to twenty automations, each with up to sixteen blocks — enough for real work, small enough that a diagram stays readable.
- A single run writes at most five hundred rows, so an enormous page cannot accidentally dump thousands of lines into your spreadsheet.
- Name your columns the way your spreadsheet headers are named. That is the whole trick to an automation and a sheet fitting together.
- Selectors break when a site is redesigned. Preview is the fastest way to find out which block has gone quiet.
- Everything here — the diagram, the run, the results — happens in your browser, and the rows travel from your machine straight to Google's API.
Build one this afternoon.
The first automation takes about ten minutes. Every run after that takes a keystroke.