The Scenario
You are a PMO director at a professional services firm. The new quarter starts Monday. You have 30 client projects in an Excel workbook on the Projects tab, one per row, columns for project name, budget, start date, end date, and assigned project manager email.
Hub Planner needs every one of those projects created before the team can log their first booking. You told yourself you would do it Friday afternoon. It is now 4:15 PM Friday and you have not started.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- Open Hub Planner in one tab, your workbook in another
- Read row 1, switch tabs, type the project name, type the budget, set the dates, look up the PM in the resource list
- Submit, confirm the project was created, flip back to the workbook, check row 2
- Make a typo on row 7 and not catch it until a PM complains Monday morning
- You finish row 20 at 6 PM and give up. Monday arrives with 10 projects missing.
The fast version takes one prompt and you leave at 4:30.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the rows and creates the Hub Planner projects for you, so you never have to switch tabs or retype a value.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in the Projects tab, create a Hub Planner project using the name in column A, budget in column B, start date in column C, and end date in column D. Set the project manager to the email in column E. Write the new project ID to column F and any error message to column G.
SheetXAI reads all 30 rows from the Projects tab, calls Hub Planner's project creation API for each one, resolves the PM email to a resource ID, and writes the new project IDs back to column F. Any row that fails lands an error in column G.
What You Get
30 Hub Planner projects created, with a complete audit trail back in the workbook:
- Column F — the Hub Planner project ID for every successful row
- Column G — the error message for any row that did not go through
- Zero retyping — every value came from the workbook
The error column is what makes this safe to run on 30 rows at once. You do not have to babysit each API call. You run the prompt, review the results, fix the two rows with issues, and run those two again.
Want milestones added at creation? Tell SheetXAI to create one milestone per project using a deadline column, and it chains both API calls per row.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Project plan workbooks are rarely clean on the Friday before a quarter starts. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the creation in the same prompt.
When date formats are inconsistent across rows
Some rows have "2026-07-01," others have "Jul 1 2026," a few have "1/7/26." Hub Planner's API expects ISO format.
Normalize all dates in columns C and D of the Projects tab to ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). Then create a Hub Planner project for each row using the corrected dates, with the PM email from column E, and write the project ID to column F.
When some project managers are missing
A handful of rows have a blank PM email because the assignment is still pending.
For rows in the Projects tab where column E is blank, create the Hub Planner project without a project manager and write "PM pending" into column G. For rows where column E has an email, set the project manager normally. Write the project ID to column F for all rows.
When the budget column has currency symbols
Finance formatted the budget column with dollar signs and commas: "$125,000." Hub Planner expects a plain number.
Strip currency symbols and commas from column B in the Projects tab before creating the Hub Planner projects. Then create one project per row and write the project ID to column F.
When the workbook mixes active and archived projects
The workbook was copied from last quarter and still has rows for completed projects that should not be re-created.
Filter the Projects tab to rows where column H says "Active." For those rows only, create Hub Planner projects using name, budget, start date, end date, and PM email from columns A through E. Write the new project ID to column F. Skip all other rows and write "Skipped — not active" to column F for them.
The pattern: describe the cleanup and the creation together. SheetXAI handles the normalization before it calls the API, so the projects land with clean data.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any project plan workbook you have been entering manually, then ask SheetXAI to create the Hub Planner projects from it. The Hub Planner integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-create milestones from a workbook or the Hub Planner in Excel overview.