The Scenario
The engineering team renamed their label taxonomy three weeks ago. "tech-debt" became "refactor." The decision was made in a planning meeting. What nobody scoped was the cleanup: 40 existing Linear issues still have the old label. The identifiers are all in an Excel worksheet from a previous export.
The bad version:
- Open Linear, search for the first issue identifier, open the ticket, click the X on "tech-debt," click "Add label," type "refactor," select it, save.
- Forty tickets at five clicks each is 200 clicks. You will mistype a label name at least once and accidentally create a new label that needs to be cleaned up later.
The person assigned the cleanup has two other things on fire today.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the issue identifiers from your worksheet and applies label changes across all of them through Linear's integration — add, remove, or both, in bulk.
Remove the label "tech-debt" from every Linear issue listed in column A and add the label "refactor" to each one
What You Get
- All 40 issues updated — "tech-debt" removed, "refactor" added.
- Issues where "tech-debt" wasn't present still get "refactor" added without failing.
- Identifiers that don't exist surface as warnings.
- A completion summary with the count of issues updated.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Different rows need different label swaps
For each issue identifier in column A: remove the label in column B and add the label in column C in Linear
Some issues only need a label added
For every row in this workbook where column D says "add-only": add the label in column C to the Linear issue in column A without removing any existing labels
You want to see current labels before making changes
For each Linear issue identifier in column A, write its current labels into column B — do not make any changes yet
Full taxonomy migration with logging
For each row in this workbook: check the Linear issue in column A — if it has the label in column B, remove it and add the label in column C; if it does not have the label in column B, just add the label in column C — write "updated" or the error message into column D
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of Linear issue identifiers and label changes — then ask it to apply all the swaps at once. If you also need to archive some of these issues after re-tagging, the bulk-archive guide covers that next step.