How to Connect Hub Planner to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem with Getting Excel Data Into Hub Planner

Hub Planner is where your team's capacity lives. Projects, bookings, timesheets, resource groups, billing rates, milestones. The data is there, and the reports it produces are useful. The problem is getting your Excel workbook data in, and Hub Planner's data back out, without turning every transfer into an afternoon of copy-paste.

Most teams keep their source of truth in Excel workbooks: the HR roster that HR maintains on SharePoint, the project plan the PMO owns in a shared workbook, the contractor timesheet finance collects manually, the billing rate card the account director signs off on. Moving that data into Hub Planner, record by record through the UI, is work nobody wants and nobody has time for. And pulling Hub Planner data back out into a workbook for reporting is just as painful in reverse.

Excel users have an added wrinkle: workbooks often live on SharePoint or OneDrive and are owned by different teams. When it is time to push data to Hub Planner, the person doing the push is not always the person who owns the workbook, and the data is not always in the format Hub Planner expects.

Below are the four ways teams typically handle the Hub Planner and Excel gap. Only the last one handles volume.

Method 1: Enter the Data by Hand in Hub Planner's UI

The default. You open the workbook, read what is there, open Hub Planner in another tab, and type. New project: name, budget, start date, end date, project manager. New resource: first name, last name, email, role, department. Timesheet entry: resource, project, date, hours.

When this works:

• You have fewer than five records to enter
• It is a one-off, not a repeating transfer
• The person entering it has Hub Planner open all day anyway

When it breaks:

• The project plan has 30 new client projects starting next quarter
• Finance collected 400 contractor timesheet rows in a workbook
• HR onboarded 25 new hires and sent you a spreadsheet
• Billing rates need to be replicated across a new client group

The math is punishing regardless of which spreadsheet tool you use. Thirty projects at three minutes each is ninety minutes before a single field is wrong and you have to start over. The data is in the workbook. The retyping is the waste.

Method 2: Use Power Automate to Sync When a Row Changes

Power Automate is the natural choice when your workbooks live on OneDrive or SharePoint. You build a flow that watches for new rows and fires a Hub Planner API call when one appears.

This works for event-driven moments:

• A new client is signed and someone adds a row to the project tracker workbook
• A new contractor joins and HR adds their row to the roster on SharePoint
• A billing rate is approved and finance adds it to the rate card workbook

This fails for batch and analytical work:

• You need to create 30 projects in one pass before the quarter kicks off
• You need to push 400 timesheet rows before the billing cycle closes
• You need to pull all bookings for a date range back into a workbook for utilization reporting
• You need to create milestones across 15 projects from a single milestone workbook

Power Automate fires row by row on trigger. It does not look at the workbook as a whole, it does not handle batch errors across 400 rows gracefully, and it does not pull data back from Hub Planner in the other direction. You also pay per run, and 400 timesheet rows is 400 runs.

Method 3: The Previous Generation, Spreadsheet Connector Add-Ins

Until recently, the most capable option for connecting Excel workbooks to project management tools was a category of connector add-ins. You configured a field mapping between workbook columns and the target API fields, saved the configuration, and ran the sync on demand.

That was a genuine improvement over manual entry. The mapping was reusable, the sync was repeatable, and you did not have to retype anything.

But you were still responsible for everything the connector could not see: error handling when an email did not match a resource ID, transformations like converting hours to minutes before the Hub Planner API would accept them, lookups to resolve a project code into a Hub Planner project ID, and conditional logic about which rows to include. The connector moved the data; the thinking was still on you. And when the workbook structure changed, you went back in and remapped it.

This is the category we think of as the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator. It also did not bridge the gap between an on-premise Excel desktop file and a cloud API cleanly, leaving hybrid flows that nobody really wanted to maintain.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook, both on Excel for the web and Excel desktop. It reads the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in Hub Planner integration it can create projects, push timesheet entries, pull bookings, set up resources, or configure billing rates for you. No field mapping, no Power Automate flows, no manual entry, you just ask.

Example 1: Your Data Is Already in the Workbook

You have an HR roster workbook open on the Contractors tab, 25 rows, columns for first name, last name, email, role, department, and the resource group they should join.

Create a Hub Planner resource for every row in the Contractors tab using first name from column A, last name from column B, email from column C, and role from column D. Add each resource to the group ID in column E. Write the new resource ID to column F and any errors to column G.

SheetXAI reads all 25 rows, calls Hub Planner's API for each, handles the group assignment, and writes results back to the workbook. You end the session with a complete record of what was created and what failed.

Example 2: Your Data Lives Somewhere Else

If your project data lives in a CRM or a project intake form, SheetXAI can pull it into the workbook and push it to Hub Planner in the same prompt:

Pull all deals marked "Closed Won" this quarter from HubSpot, write them into this workbook's Projects tab with deal name, value, start date, and assigned CSM email, then create a Hub Planner project for each one with the CSM as project manager. Write the new Hub Planner project ID back to column F.

SheetXAI fetches the CRM data, populates the workbook, and provisions the projects. One prompt, two systems, the workbook is the working record between them.

Which Method Should You Use

For a handful of records you are adding once, manual entry in Hub Planner's UI is fine. For event-driven work where a single new row should always produce a single new record, Power Automate is a workable fit.

For batch operations, creating 30 projects, pushing 400 timesheet rows, pulling all bookings for a utilization report, onboarding 25 contractors, creating milestones across 15 projects, SheetXAI is the only option that handles the full operation in one prompt, with results written back to the workbook where you can audit them.

If you do this kind of data transfer more than once a quarter, the second run pays for the first many times over.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook you already sync to Hub Planner by hand, then ask SheetXAI to do the transfer. The Hub Planner integration is included in every plan.

For specific workflows, see how to bulk-create Hub Planner projects from an Excel workbook, how to import timesheet rows from Excel into Hub Planner, or browse the full integrations directory.