The Scenario
After a test batch run that produced forty failed tasks, your workspace is cluttered with dead weight. The QA engineer who ran the batch is trying to clean up before the production run starts, but the task list in Manus is 120 items long and only forty of them need to go. The IDs of the failed tasks are already in column A of an Excel workbook. It's a twenty-minute job — unless you have to delete them one at a time through the UI.
In the UI, it's a twenty-minute job.
The bad version:
- Search for task ID one in Manus, click into it, find the delete option, confirm the deletion, go back to the task list, search for task ID two.
- Lose your place after task fifteen when a browser tab refresh resets the search filter.
- Give up around task twenty-two and leave the rest, hoping no one notices before the production run starts.
The production run starts in two hours. You cannot have forty ghost tasks in the workspace muddying the task history.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the task IDs from column A and deletes each corresponding Manus task — flagging successes and failures in column B as it goes.
For every task ID in column A of this Excel workbook, permanently delete the Manus task and write 'deleted' or the error message into column B
What You Get
- Every task in column A permanently deleted from Manus.
- Column B marked 'deleted' for each successful deletion.
- Any task that can't be deleted (already gone, wrong ID, permission error) gets the error detail written into column B instead of 'deleted' — so you know exactly what's left.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some IDs in column A might already be deleted — I want to skip those gracefully
For each task ID in column A, attempt to delete the Manus task — if it no longer exists, write 'already deleted' in column B; if deletion succeeds, write 'deleted'; if it fails for another reason, write the error message
I want to delete only stopped tasks and leave running ones alone
For each task ID in column A, fetch the task status first — if the status is 'stopped', delete it and mark column B as 'deleted'; if it's not stopped, write 'skipped' in column B and leave the task in place
The IDs in column A have extra text I need to strip first
For each row in column A, extract just the task ID (a string of alphanumeric characters) from the cell text before attempting the deletion, then mark column B as 'deleted' or the error detail
Delete the tasks, summarize the outcome, and flag anything that needs manual review
Delete all Manus tasks in column A, mark column B with 'deleted' or the error message for each row, then add a summary at the bottom: total deleted, total failed, and a list of task IDs that returned errors so I can investigate them
The summary at the bottom gives you the audit line for whoever asks what happened to those forty tasks before the production run.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of Manus task IDs you need to clear out, then ask it to run the deletion batch and mark each row with the outcome. For the step that comes after cleanup, see bulk task creation, or go back to the Manus hub.