The Scenario
Q3 capacity planning is finalized. A resource manager has an Excel table called "ResourcePlan" — 40 rows with columns for UserGID, ProjectGID, StartDate, EndDate, and HoursPerWeek. Every one of those rows needs to be created as an Asana resource allocation before the quarter begins.
She has used Asana's Workload view. For four or five allocations it is manageable. For 40 across 12 projects, it requires navigating to each project's resource view, dragging blocks, setting effort values, and hoping the interface behaves consistently across all 12.
It is Thursday. Q3 starts Monday.
The bad version:
- Open Asana's Portfolio Workload view. Find team member 1 on the grid. Drag an allocation block for project 1. Set the start date. Set the end date. Set hours per week.
- Find team member 2. Repeat.
- At allocation 12, realize the block you dragged snapped to the wrong week because of a timezone offset in the date display. Recalibrate and re-check the previous 11.
- Finish 40 allocations in two hours, hoping you caught the timezone issue everywhere.
Capacity planning is supposed to give leadership confidence about what the team can actually deliver next quarter. A plan built through a drag interface with hidden date snapping behavior is not that foundation.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the "ResourcePlan" table and creates all 40 Asana resource allocations in one operation — no dragging, no date snapping, no manual effort entry.
Read the Excel table 'ResourcePlan' and create one Asana allocation per row. Columns: UserGID, ProjectGID, StartDate, EndDate, HoursPerWeek. Write the new allocation ID back into column F.
What You Get
- All 40 allocations created with the correct user, project, date range, and effort values
- Column F receives the new allocation GID for each successful row
- Rows that fail — invalid user GID, project not found, date format error — get the specific error written into column F instead of a GID
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Dates in the table are stored as Excel serial numbers
Read the 'ResourcePlan' table. Convert the values in StartDate and EndDate columns from Excel serial number format to ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) before creating each Asana allocation. Use UserGID, ProjectGID, converted dates, and HoursPerWeek for the allocation parameters. Write the allocation GID or error into column F.
Effort is expressed as total hours for the period, not hours per week
For each row in the 'ResourcePlan' table, calculate hours per week by dividing the TotalHours column by the number of weeks between StartDate and EndDate (round to one decimal place). Create the Asana allocation using UserGID, ProjectGID, StartDate, EndDate, and the calculated hours per week. Write the allocation GID or error into column F.
Some user GIDs in the table are from a previous workspace and will fail
For each row in the 'ResourcePlan' table, attempt to create an Asana allocation. If the UserGID or ProjectGID is not found in the workspace, write "Not found: [field]" in column F and skip that row. For successful rows, write the allocation GID.
Validate all GIDs, create allocations, and summarize capacity by person in one prompt
Verify that each UserGID and ProjectGID in the 'ResourcePlan' table exists in Asana. For invalid rows, write the error into column F. For valid rows, create the allocation and write the GID into column F. After all rows are processed, write a summary to the 'CapacitySummary' worksheet: one row per unique UserGID showing their total allocated hours across all projects in this batch.
Validation, allocation creation, and per-person utilization summary — all before the Q3 kickoff on Monday.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your capacity planning workbook — ask SheetXAI to create all 40 Asana allocations from the ResourcePlan table before the quarter begins. You can also look at how to pull completed task data to evaluate how last quarter's capacity plan held up, or return to the Asana hub for the full list of available workflows.