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Turn email enquiries into Excel or Google Sheets rows

An email enquiry often mixes contact details, a requested service, a budget and several unanswered questions in one paragraph. A spreadsheet becomes useful when those pieces have separate columns and someone is responsible for the next reply.

This guide covers customer enquiry text. It is not an attachment converter or an inbox synchronization tutorial. You can follow the manual workflow with your existing email and spreadsheet applications.

Example: a website project enquiry

“I’m Jordan from Cedar Studio in Bristol. We need a five-page website for our bakery. Our budget is £2,000. Contact jordan@example.com.”

The useful row contains Jordan, jordan@example.com, a five-page bakery website, Bristol and GBP 2,000. The launch date is missing. Before quoting, ask when the site needs to launch and whether the customer will supply the copy and images.

Move the message into columns

1. Copy the relevant enquiry body. Leave out unrelated quoted threads or signatures that could introduce another person's contact details.
2. Create columns for name, email, request, location, budget amount, currency, requested date and source message.
3. Copy only facts the customer supplied. Put your interpretation or proposed next step in a separate notes or next-action column.
4. Review amounts carefully. “Up to £2,000” is a ceiling, not an agreed price. Preserve that wording in the source.
5. Save the sheet or export a CSV if you need to import it into another tool.

Working with a batch of messages

If your form or export tool produces a CSV, use one message per row with a header such as message. Fields containing commas or line breaks must be quoted correctly. Download our sample enquiry import CSV to inspect the format, then select the message column in the agency workspace example.

The preview accepts up to 100 queued messages, 8,000 characters per message and a 200 KB CSV file. It checks import structure locally. It does not read your inbox or extract new messages with AI yet; the selectable examples have prepared results.

Opening the result in a spreadsheet

Download the sample CSV and open it in Excel, or use your spreadsheet application's import command. Choose comma-separated input and UTF-8 if the importer asks. Confirm that currency signs and names display correctly. Keep the currency and amount in separate columns so mixed-currency budgets are not added together accidentally.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Guessing a launch date from “soon.” Keep the original wording and ask for a specific date.
• Taking a forwarded sender's email as the customer's address without checking the message.
• Overwriting an older enquiry when a customer asks for a second, different project.
• Treating an exported row as a commitment to price or availability.

For the follow-up stage, use the customer enquiry tracker. Structured intake prepares the row; your business still reviews it and decides how to respond.