The Scenario
You are a program manager. Quarterly planning session is Friday. You have an Excel workbook with 60 milestone rows on the Milestones tab, columns for milestone name, project code, and target date, spread across 15 active projects.
All 60 milestones need to be in Hub Planner before the session so the team can see the timeline. Right now, Hub Planner has none of them.
The bad version of Thursday:
- Open Hub Planner, navigate to project one
- Click "Add Milestone," type the name, pick the date
- Go to milestone two for the same project
- Finish project one, navigate to project two
- Make a date entry error on milestone 23 and not catch it until the planning session
- You spend Thursday afternoon on milestone entry. You enter 45 of 60 before you have to stop for another meeting.
The fast version is one prompt before lunch.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the milestone rows and creates them in Hub Planner across all 15 projects in one pass.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in the Milestones tab, create a Hub Planner milestone with the name from column A under the project ID in column B on the target date in column C. Write the new milestone ID to column D and any error message to column E.
SheetXAI reads all 60 rows from the Milestones tab, calls Hub Planner's milestone API for each one, groups them under the correct project, and writes the new milestone IDs back to column D. Any row that fails gets an error in column E.
What You Get
60 Hub Planner milestones, distributed across 15 projects, with a complete result set in the workbook:
- Column D — the new Hub Planner milestone ID for every successful row
- Column E — error message for any row that did not create
- Zero manual navigation — you did not open a single project page in Hub Planner
The IDs in column D are useful immediately. If you need to update or link milestones in a later step, you have the IDs in the workbook without needing to look them up.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Milestone workbooks collected from multiple project owners are rarely consistent. SheetXAI handles the issues before it calls the API.
When target dates are in different formats across rows
Project owners submitted dates as "July 15," "15-Jul-26," and "2026-07-15." Hub Planner expects ISO format.
Normalize all dates in column C of the Milestones tab to ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). Then create one Hub Planner milestone per row using the normalized date and write the milestone ID to column D.
When the project column has project names instead of IDs
The workbook was built by project managers who wrote project names, not Hub Planner project IDs.
For each row, look up the Hub Planner project ID by project name from column B. Use each resolved ID to create the milestone. Write the resolved project ID to column F and the milestone ID to column D. For any project name that does not resolve, write an error to column E.
When some milestones are marked "TBD" and should be skipped
A handful of rows have "TBD" in the target date column because the date is not confirmed yet.
Skip any row in the Milestones tab where column C says "TBD" or is blank. Write "Skipped — date not confirmed" to column E for those rows. For all other rows, create the Hub Planner milestone and write the milestone ID to column D.
When you need to create milestones and also update each project's status to "Active"
The projects exist in Hub Planner but are still marked "Planning." Creating milestones is the trigger for moving them to active.
For each row in the Milestones tab, create a Hub Planner milestone with the name from column A, project ID from column B, and date from column C. After creating the milestone, update the project status to "Active" for the project in column B. Write the milestone ID to column D and the updated project status to column F.
The pattern: describe any cleanup alongside the creation. The workbook ends the session as a complete record of what Hub Planner now contains.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your milestone planning workbook, then ask SheetXAI to create all milestones in Hub Planner. The Hub Planner integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-create projects from a workbook or the Hub Planner in Excel overview.