WonkaQ: Why so many permissions needed?
Hi whats the reason for asking for so many permission for the add on google sheets? permission 3-5 makes no sense why you need those and not making me comfortable to buy your tool.
1. See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Sheets spreadsheets.
2. Connect to an external service.
3. Send email as you.
4. Allow this application to run when you are not present.
5. View your country, language, and timezone.
David_SheetXAI
Feb 21, 2026A: Hey Wonka! Great question about the permissions — happy to break them all down for you.
Access to all your sheets — SheetXAI needs to read and edit your sheets to do its job. That's the core of what we do, so this one's pretty straightforward.
Sidebar access — This is just so the SheetXAI sidebar can load and run inside your spreadsheet.
Permission to send emails as you — This powers our mail merge feature. Right now it's a two-step process, but eventually you'll be able to say something like "make this report and send it to my team" all in one command. We also had a debug feature where, if you specifically pressed the debug button and chose to send us your sheet diagnostics, it would share info like what AI model you were using, what prompt you ran, whether you're on Sheets or Excel, etc. That way when you reach out with an issue, we don't have to ask you a million questions — we'd already have what we need to help. That debug feature isn't available right now, but it's coming back soon.
About the send email as you one though, I am taking it out and maybe by the time you reload your page and install it, you won't see it anymore. We haven't had many users use the mail merge feature, so we can request this one when needed rather than at all times.
Permission to operate when you're not active — This is what makes automations, edit triggers, and integrations actually work. For example, if you're using something like Apify that takes time to process, we need to be able to write results back to your sheet even while you're away.
Access to external links — We connect to services like OpenAI and OpenRouter and all the other AI poroviders to power the AI, so we need to reach those endpoints.
Hope that clears things up — let me know if you have any other questions!
Verified purchaser
Thank you that clears it up for me well.
-For complex tasks whats the longest the AI will think before executing you have experienced ?
-with automations can the tool for example connect to an rss feed then create social posts and connect to X and post for me automatically daily?
-whats the most powerful autumation a user has made? would help me better understand the power available
Verified purchaser
- The AI is actually trained to execute asap, so it doesn't do too much thinking in the same message where it will be executing. If it starts thinking too much, there is most likely a bug and you should email me immediately.
- Nah, that's not possible at the moment. If you can connect an rss feed to your sheet though, the tool shoudl be able to create social posts everyday, but def not post it.
Verified purchaser
- For the 3rd question, it's a bit tough because we don't log the automations that users make. Tell me a bit about how you use AI, sheets, and content, and I can tell you what would be a powerful automation that you currently can create.