The Scenario
An agile coach is preparing for the Engineering team's sprint retrospective. Before the retro can be useful, the data needs to be in front of the team: every issue from the last completed cycle, with its final state, assignee, and estimate, so the group can calculate velocity without arguing over what actually shipped. Linear has all of this. It's just not in a workbook yet.
The bad version:
- Navigate to the Engineering team's cycle history in Linear, find the last completed cycle, scroll through 35 issues, and manually copy identifier, title, state, assignee, estimate, and completion date into an Excel worksheet.
- The cycle view doesn't show all the fields on one screen. Some require opening individual tickets.
- Halfway through you realize you forgot the estimate column and have to go back for 20 rows.
The retrospective starts in two hours.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It queries Linear for the last completed cycle's issues and writes the full field set into the workbook in one call.
Pull all issues from the most recently completed cycle for the Engineering team and write the identifier, title, state, assignee, estimate, and completed date into this workbook
What You Get
- One row per issue from the last completed Engineering cycle.
- Columns for identifier, title, final state, assignee name, estimate, and completion date.
- A header row written automatically so the workbook is immediately readable.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need a specific cycle by ID, not the most recent one
Export every issue from Linear cycle ID in cell A1 into this workbook with columns for identifier, title, final status, and story points
Velocity broken down by assignee
Pull all issues from the most recently completed Engineering cycle into this workbook with identifier, title, state, assignee, and estimate — then add a summary section showing total story points completed per assignee
Filter out sub-issues from the velocity count
Pull all issues from the last completed Engineering cycle into this workbook with identifier, title, state, assignee, parent issue identifier, and estimate — flag each row in column G as "parent" or "child" based on whether it has a parent issue
Full retro data dump with analysis
Pull all issues from the last completed Engineering cycle into this workbook with identifier, title, state, assignee, and estimate — add a column marking whether the final state is "Done" or not, then add a summary row at the bottom showing total issues, total completed, completion rate percentage, and total story points completed
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Excel workbook before your next sprint retrospective — then ask it to pull the last completed cycle's data and calculate completion stats inline. Pair this with the cross-project summary guide to roll velocity metrics up across multiple teams.