How to Build SWOT Guides in Google Sheets & Excel Fast

### Why Competitor SWOT Still MattersIf you run a business, agency, or growth team, you already do competitor analysis — usually in a rush before a pitch, launch, or board meeting. A good competitor SWOT template turns that scramble into a steady habit: one sheet where strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are laid out clearly across every rival.The question isn’t *if* you should do this. It’s *how* you do it without losing half your week to copy-paste, screenshots, and messy notes.Below are practical ways to build and maintain your competitor SWOT analysis, from fully manual to fully automated with an AI computer agent like Simular.---### Way 1: Manual SWOT in Google Sheets (Single Marketer Mode)**Best for:** Solo founders, marketers, and consultants validating a few key competitors.**Step-by-step:**1. **Create your grid.** In Google Sheets, set columns for Competitor, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, Notes, and Source URL.2. **List competitors.** Add the 5–10 names you actually bump into in deals, search results, or RFPs.3. **Research systematically.** For each competitor, open their website, pricing page, product docs, review sites, and social channels.4. **Write bullets, not essays.** Capture 3–7 bullets per SWOT quadrant. Link each bullet back to a source.5. **Color-code patterns.** Use simple conditional formatting (e.g., blue for product, green for pricing, orange for GTM) so patterns pop at a glance.**Pros:**- Zero setup cost.- Forces you to really read and understand each rival.**Cons:**- Time-consuming and repetitive.- Hard to keep fresh once the day job catches up with you.---### Way 2: Excel Power User Workflow (Deeper Quant + Pivot Views)**Best for:** Revenue leaders, finance, or strategy teams who want numbers *and* narrative.**Step-by-step:**1. **Start from a table, not a matrix.** In Excel, build a long-form table: each row is one competitor + one SWOT item.2. **Add structure.** Columns like Type (S/W/O/T), Theme (pricing, product, brand), Evidence Score, Source, and Date allow for pivot analysis.3. **Use PivotTables.** Summarize: “How many pricing-related weaknesses does Competitor A have?” or “Which threats appear across all rivals?”4. **Link to charts.** Turn pivot results into quick bar charts and heat maps for exec slides.**Pros:**- Great for large competitor sets and long time horizons.- Easy to slice by segment, region, theme.**Cons:**- Still manual data entry.- Can feel heavy for non-analysts.---### Way 3: Semi-Automated Research (Formulas + Simple Scripts)**Best for:** Teams not ready for full agents but tired of pure manual work.**Ideas:**- In **Google Sheets**, use `IMPORTXML` or `IMPORTHTML` to pull pricing tables, feature lists, or headlines directly from competitor sites.- Store common review URLs and use Apps Script or simple add-ons to fetch recent review snippets.- Use lookup tables to auto-tag themes (e.g., any bullet containing “price” or “discount” becomes Theme = Pricing).**Pros:**- Reduces some grunt work.- Still easy to understand and maintain.**Cons:**- Breaks when websites change structure.- Limited to data that lives in predictable HTML.---### Way 4: Fully Automated With a Simular AI Computer Agent**Best for:** Agencies, growth teams, and sales orgs who need living, weekly-updated SWOTs across dozens of competitors.With Simular Pro, you’re not just using an API. You’re delegating the entire computer workflow to an agent that behaves like a focused analyst.**What the Simular agent can do:**- Open a browser, visit each competitor site, and navigate pricing, product, docs, and blog.- Log into tools you already use (e.g., review platforms) and gather up-to-date feedback.- Paste structured summaries straight into your Google Sheets or Excel workbook.- Run thousands of micro-steps reliably, with every action logged and inspectable.**Example workflow:**1. You maintain a simple list of competitor URLs and target keywords in Google Sheets.2. On a schedule (say, every Monday), a Simular Pro agent: - Reads that list. - Visits each site, scans pages, and extracts changes in messaging, pricing, and features. - Pulls 5–10 fresh reviews per brand from your usual sources. - Writes concise SWOT bullets and updates the appropriate cells.3. You open the sheet, scan highlights, and refine strategy instead of digging for raw data.**Pros:**- Massive time savings for recurring analysis.- Production-grade reliability across thousands or even millions of steps.- Transparent execution: every click and keystroke is visible, editable, and repeatable.**Cons:**- Requires a bit of upfront onboarding (defining your template, login flows, and sources).- Best suited to knowledge workers comfortable letting an agent drive their desktop and browser.---### Way 5: Blended Model — Human Judgment, Agent MuscleIn practice, the sweet spot is hybrid. Let Simular’s AI computer agent handle:- Opening tabs, logging in, exporting CSVs.- Copying key snippets and metrics into your SWOT template.Then you — founder, marketer, or strategist — do what humans are great at:- Framing which strengths *actually* win deals.- Interpreting whether a “threat” is noise or a strategic warning.- Turning the SWOT into positioning, pitches, and campaigns.This way, you keep your brain on high-leverage thinking while the agent handles the 1,500 hours a year of clicks and drags.