The Scenario
A senior engineer broke down an epic over the weekend. ENG-204 is the parent issue. The breakdown lives in an Excel workbook: 12 rows, each with a sub-task title and a short description. The engineers are expecting those child issues to exist in Linear when they sit down for refinement on Tuesday morning.
The bad version:
- Open Linear, navigate to ENG-204, find the sub-issue section, click "Add sub-issue," type the first sub-task title, paste the description, save.
- Repeat 11 more times. The sub-issue section collapses after every save, requiring a scroll back each time.
- After the fifth sub-issue you start abbreviating descriptions to save time. By issue 10 you've skipped the description entirely for two of them.
The planning work happened on Sunday. The data entry shouldn't happen at all.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads each row of your breakdown worksheet and creates all the child issues under the parent you specify — preserving every title and description exactly as written.
Create a child issue under Linear issue ENG-204 for each row in this workbook using column A as the title and column B as the description
What You Get
- 12 child issues created under ENG-204, with exact titles and descriptions from the workbook.
- Sub-issues appear in Linear's parent issue view in row order.
- Rows with blank descriptions create issues without a description rather than failing.
- A confirmation with the count of child issues created and their identifiers.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The parent issue identifier is in a cell, not hardcoded
Create a child issue under the Linear issue identifier in cell A1 for each row starting at row 3, using column B as the title and column C as the description
Sub-issues need to be assigned at creation
Create a child issue under ENG-204 for each row using column A as the title, column B as the description, and assign each to the Linear user with the email in column C
Some rows are marked as not ready
Create a child issue under ENG-204 for every row where column C says "ready", using column A as the title and column B as the description
Full epic breakdown with writeback
Create a child issue under the Linear issue in cell A1 for every row below row 2 where column D says "ready": use column A as the title, column B as the description, and assign to the email in column C — write the new sub-issue identifier into column E for each row
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a task breakdown — sub-task titles, descriptions, optional assignees — then ask it to create all the child issues under a parent in Linear. See the bulk-update guide if you need to assign and prioritize those sub-issues after creating them.