The Scenario
PI planning wrapped up and the technical program manager has a 35-row dependency table in an Excel workbook: source issue key in column A, link type in column B, target issue key in column C. None of those dependency relationships exist yet in Jira. The planning board sequence is wrong until they do — and the program sync is tomorrow morning.
The bad version:
- Open Jira, navigate to the first source issue from column A.
- Click the link button, choose the link type from the dropdown, type the target key, save.
- Navigate to the second source issue. Repeat.
- Hit issue 20 and realize the link type in your workbook says "blocked by" but Jira's dropdown uses "is blocked by" — and several of the ones you already created are using the wrong relationship direction.
Thirty-five link operations at three minutes each is nearly two hours. Discovering the type mismatch halfway through means a second pass to delete and recreate the incorrect ones.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the dependency table and through the Jira integration creates every link in one operation.
Read my Excel dependency table and create all 35 Jira issue links — column A is the source issue, column B is the link type (e.g. 'blocks'), and column C is the target issue.
What You Get
- One Jira issue link created per row using source, type, and target from the corresponding columns.
- Any failure surfaced per row — invalid link type, key not found, duplicate link — rather than failing silently.
- Successful links and error messages appear in a result column so you can identify exceptions immediately.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The link type values in column B don't match Jira's accepted names exactly
Your workbook has "blocks," "blocked by," and "related" — Jira expects "Blocks," "is blocked by," and "relates to."
Before creating links, normalize the type values in column B to match Jira's accepted names: 'blocks' becomes 'Blocks', 'blocked by' becomes 'is blocked by', 'related' becomes 'relates to'. Then create all issue links and write the result into column D.
Some rows in the workbook have already been linked from a prior partial run
Column D has 'linked' in several rows from yesterday. You don't want duplicate links for those rows.
For each row in my Dependencies sheet where column D is empty or contains an error (not 'linked'), create the Jira issue link using columns A, B, C and write the result into column D. Skip rows already marked 'linked'.
You want to verify both issue keys exist before creating any links
Some keys might be from a project that was recently archived or renamed.
For each row in my Dependencies sheet, verify that both the issue key in column A and the issue key in column C exist in Jira. Write 'invalid key' in column D and skip any row where either key is not found. Create links for valid rows and write the result into column D.
Kill chain: validate keys, normalize link types, create links, and summarize
For each row in my Dependencies sheet, check that both the source key in column A and the target key in column C exist in Jira. Normalize the link type in column B to Jira's exact names. Skip rows where column D already says 'linked'. Create the remaining links and write 'linked' or the error into column D. In cell F1, write a summary: how many created, how many skipped, how many errored.
Combining validation, normalization, and creation prevents a partial run that leaves half your dependencies wired up incorrectly.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your dependency mapping Excel workbook with source keys in column A and target keys in column C, then ask it to create every issue link in Jira before the program sync. See also: how to bulk create Jira issues from a spreadsheet and how to bulk update issue fields.