An AI workflow for all of your reporting & spreadsheets 📊

Hello everybody, welcome back to Moodboard 🌴

First off, welcome to everyone who's joined us over the past week. There are a lot of you, and it’s good to have you here!

This week's edition came from a reader request (shoutout Andy B!). He reached out asking how to create reports & spreadsheets more efficiently using AI.

Honestly, it was perfect timing because I'd been testing a tool that solves this exact problem.

The tool is called Shortcut.ai, and it's incredibly useful for anyone who needs to build spreadsheets, financial models, or marketing reports quickly.

(Quick note: I'm not getting paid by Shortcut.ai to write this. I just think it's a useful tool worth sharing)

And, instead of just showing you the tool, I wanted to share the workflow I've been using to get better results from it. 

It's a ‘wizard prompt’ that creates detailed Shortcut.ai prompts for you, so you don't have to manually type out all the requirements and specifications. Let’s get into it 👇

Today's Workflow

Shortcut.ai is pretty powerful. You give it a natural language prompt, and it builds formulas, charts, financial models, data cleaning operations, basically anything you'd normally spend an hour+ doing manually. 

All in a UI that’s near-identical to Excel.

(When you first try Shortcut, you get 30 free credits, which is definitely enough to experiment with today’s workflow)

With such a powerful tool at our disposal, the only limiter for most people is creating a detailed/accurate enough prompt. 

We’re lazy. We say something like "create a marketing forecast" and wonder why the output is generic or missing key elements.

So I built ‘a wizard prompt’ that interviews you about what you actually need. It asks the right questions, gathers all the details, then creates a complete, specific prompt for Shortcut.

The Wizard Prompt

For those that are new here, ‘a wizard prompt’ is just what I call a prompt that guides you through a series of questions and then creates a detailed output based on your answers (like a software ‘wizard’ might).

If you've been reading Moodboard for a while, you know I love this approach because it saves time and consistently produces better results than trying to craft prompts manually from scratch.

All you have to do is copy/paste into Claude/ChatGPT/your LLM of choice to get started.

Here's the prompt 👇

As always, I highly recommend using a voice-to-text tool like Wispr Flow to go through this process. 

Speaking your answers is way faster than typing, and you can ramble through your thoughts without worrying about perfect phrasing.

How to Use It

Here's how the process goes (I used it to create a marketing forecast):

Step 1: Start the wizard workflow

Copy-paste the wizard prompt into Claude or ChatGPT. The AI will start asking you questions one at a time.

Step 2: Answer each question

Answer the questions in as much detail as you can. The more info you provide the better your “first draft” of the spreadsheet will be.

For the marketing forecast I was building it asked me questions about:

• What channels I was planning on including

• What metrics I’d like to forecast, and any assumptions it should be making

• And how I want it formatted (any conditional formatting, separate tabs, etc.)

Step 3: Get your Shortcut AI prompt

After answering all the questions, Claude generates a complete, detailed prompt ready for Shortcut.

Step 4: Copy into Shortcut AI

Head to Shortcut.ai, paste your generated prompt, and watch it build your spreadsheet.

Step 5: Edit & Refine

If something's not quite right, just describe what you want to change conversationally.

For example, after seeing all the data in one tab, I changed my mind and asked Shortcut to break everything into separate tabs. It handled this request pretty well (though I did have a couple notes/edits on formatting).

Other Cool Features & Notes

You can upload CSVs of data and have Shortcut use it to build out your reports, but, if you're wary about inputting real company data into an AI tool (some companies have strict policies against this), you can use Shortcut to build templates for your reports, then export them and input the real data afterwards.

You get all the benefits of AI-powered structure and formulas without sharing sensitive information.

One of the coolest features of Shortcut is that you can download it as an add-on for both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. This means you can use the AI features directly in the spreadsheets you're already working in, rather than having to switch between tools or platforms.

Finally, a few limitations I've noticed:

• The tool sometimes requires a few pushes and prods when something breaks or doesn't work quite right. I'm assuming this will improve over time as the tool develops. It can be finicky when cell references get broken, especially if you're making manual edits to the spreadsheet while also using the AI features.
  

• Finally, Shortcut definitely does not have a designer’s eye. It builds functional spreadsheets without much thought about visual polish or aesthetics. So if design matters for your use case (if it’s client/stakeholder facing), you might want to use Shortcut AI to create the functional template, then spend some time polishing the formatting and layout yourself. It will still save you a lot of time!

Give It a Try

This workflow works for any type of spreadsheet or report you need to build. Marketing forecasts, budget trackers, content calendars, sales dashboards. You name it.

Try it out and let me know how it goes.

Until next week,

Ryan