The Scenario
Quarterly backlog grooming is done. The product team spent two hours going through 60 stale issues and marked 28 of them "archive" in column B of an Excel worksheet. The issues haven't been touched in months. Someone needs to archive them in Linear before next week's planning session.
The bad version:
- Open Linear, search for the first identifier, open the ticket, click the three-dot menu, find "Archive," confirm the modal.
- Twenty-eight times.
- That's 84 clicks for a task that adds no strategic value. The person who got assigned the cleanup has a product review at 2 PM.
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 archives all of them in Linear at once.
Archive every Linear issue identifier listed in column A of this workbook where column B says "archive"
What You Get
- All 28 issues archived in Linear in one operation.
- Issues where column B doesn't say "archive" are left untouched.
- Identifiers that don't exist or are already archived surface as notes rather than hard errors.
- A completion summary with the count archived.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to preview the list before archiving
For each row in this workbook where column B says "archive": look up the Linear issue in column A and write its current title and state into columns C and D — do not archive anything yet
Remove the assignee before archiving
For each row where column B says "archive": remove the assignee from the Linear issue in column A, then archive it
Multiple disposition values in the workbook
For each row in this workbook: if column B says "archive", archive the Linear issue in column A; if column B says "defer", update the issue state to "Backlog"; if column B says "keep", do nothing — write the action taken into column C
Full cleanup with writeback
For each row where column B says "archive": archive the Linear issue in column A — write "archived" into column C if it succeeded, or the error message if it failed
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook from your last backlog grooming session — mark which issues to archive and ask SheetXAI to handle the cleanup. If you need a fresh snapshot of what remains after the cleanup, the export-issues guide walks through pulling that data.