The Scenario
Your marketing team is two days out from a campaign launch. The campaign manager just dropped an Excel workbook in the shared drive — a canonical list of 40 tag names, the official taxonomy that every link created for the next six months needs to follow. Client names, channel names, campaign stage labels.
Before any links get created, these tags need to exist in your Dub workspace. Otherwise whoever creates the first link will start inventing tag names freehand and the taxonomy falls apart by day three.
The bad version:
- Open Dub, go to Tags, click "Create tag," type the first name, pick a color, save.
- Repeat 39 more times.
- Notice halfway through that three of the tags you created are missing from the workbook because you lost your place and skipped rows.
- Go back and add the missing ones, then cross-reference the workbook again to make sure nothing is still absent.
The campaign goes live in 48 hours. This is not what you should be doing with them.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads your taxonomy list and creates all the tags in Dub in one operation, writing the returned tag IDs back to the workbook for your records.
Open your "Tag Taxonomy" workbook, open SheetXAI in the sidebar, and type:
Read the tag names and hex color codes from columns A and B in my Excel table and create all of them as Dub tags, writing each resulting tag ID to column C.
What You Get
- Dub creates a tag for each name in column A, using the hex color from column B where provided.
- The returned tag ID from Dub lands in column C on the same row.
- Any tag name that already exists in the workspace is noted in column D as "already exists — tag ID: [id]" rather than creating a duplicate.
- Rows where column A is blank are skipped without error.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Column A has tag names with inconsistent casing — some are title case, some all lowercase, some mixed
Before creating Dub tags, normalize all values in column A of my "Tag Taxonomy" worksheet to lowercase with hyphens replacing spaces. Then create a Dub tag for each normalized name and write the tag ID to column C. Write the normalized name to column D so I can see what was actually sent.
I only want to create tags that don't already exist in my Dub workspace
Before creating any tags, fetch the existing tag list from my Dub workspace. For each name in column A of my "Tag Taxonomy" worksheet, check whether a tag with that name already exists. If it does, write its existing ID to column C and "already exists" to column D. If it doesn't, create it, write the new ID to column C, and write "created" to column D.
Some tag names in column A contain special characters that Dub might not accept
For each tag name in column A of my "Tag Taxonomy" worksheet, sanitize the name by removing any characters that aren't letters, numbers, spaces, or hyphens. Write the sanitized name to column E, create the Dub tag using the sanitized name, and write the returned tag ID to column C.
Check for duplicates within the workbook itself, normalize names, skip existing workspace tags, and create the new ones in one shot
In the "Tag Taxonomy" worksheet, first identify any duplicate values in column A and mark them in column D. Then normalize the remaining names to lowercase with hyphens. Fetch existing Dub tags, skip any names that already exist in the workspace, and create the rest. Write tag IDs to column C and the status to column D.
The dedup, normalization, existence check, and creation happen in sequence — you get a clean record of what was created versus what was already there.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a tag taxonomy or naming list, then ask it to seed your Dub workspace in one pass. Once the tags exist, you can use SheetXAI to bulk-create short links with those tags applied, or explore the full Dub + Excel guide.