The Scenario
You are a scrum master at a software consultancy. Your client runs four-week sprints, and every sprint starts with a planning workbook: 28 tasks across two worksheets — backend in Sheet1, frontend in Sheet2. Each row has a task name in column A, due date in column B, priority in column C, and assignee email in column D. By the time planning wraps, those tasks need to be in Motion before the afternoon kickoff.
The last sprint, you created them by hand. It took 50 minutes and you still missed two tasks that sat in the workbook, uncreated, for a week before someone noticed they were not on the board.
The bad version:
- Open Motion. New Task. Copy the task name from Excel. Tab to due date. Realize the date format in Excel is MM/DD/YYYY and Motion wants a calendar picker — you click through to the right month.
- Switch back to Excel. Copy the next task name. Switch back to Motion. Repeat.
- At task 19, someone messages asking why their tasks are not in Motion yet. You respond while creating task 20 and accidentally put task 20's name on task 19.
- Finish at 3:55 PM, five minutes before kickoff, having made at least three errors you are not sure about.
Sprint velocity is supposed to go up this quarter. Not like this.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads both worksheets and pushes every task to Motion in one pass. Open the sidebar and ask.
Create Motion tasks from both Sheet1 and Sheet2. For each row, use column A for the task name, column B for the due date, column C for the priority, and column D for the assignee email. Write the returned task ID to column E on the respective sheet.
What You Get
- All 28 Motion tasks created across both sheets — backend and frontend — with the correct name, due date, priority, and assignee.
- Motion task IDs written to column E on each sheet, matched to the correct row.
- Any row that fails surfaces an error note in column E rather than disappearing silently.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Due dates are stored as Excel serial numbers, not readable dates
Excel sometimes stores dates as serial numbers internally and Motion needs a real date string.
For each row in Sheet1 and Sheet2, read the due date from column B and convert it to ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) if it is not already in that format. Then create a Motion task using column A for the name, the converted date, column C for priority, and column D for assignee. Write the task ID to column E.
Some rows have no assignee yet
Column D is blank on six rows across the two sheets — those tasks should still be created, just unassigned.
For rows in Sheet1 and Sheet2 where column D is blank, create the Motion task without an assignee using column A for the name, column B for the due date, and column C for priority. Write the returned task ID to column E and note "unassigned" in column F.
Priority values in the workbook do not match Motion's labels
Your planning workbook uses 1/2/3 for priority but Motion expects ASAP/Medium/Low.
For each row in Sheet1, convert the priority value in column C: 1 maps to ASAP, 2 maps to Medium, 3 maps to Low. Then create a Motion task using column A, column B, the converted priority, and column D. Write the task ID to column E.
Full cleanup and creation in one pass
Duplicate rows crept in during the merge of two planning files. Some due dates are blank. Priority values are inconsistent.
In Sheet1, remove duplicate rows where column A matches exactly. For rows with a blank column B, set the due date to 2026-05-30. Normalize column C so that 1 maps to ASAP, 2 maps to Medium, and 3 maps to Low. Then create a Motion task for each remaining row using column A, the cleaned column B, the normalized column C, and column D. Write the task ID to column E.
Ask for the cleanup and the task creation together — one prompt handles both.
Try It
Open your sprint planning workbook with task names, due dates, priorities, and assignees in a table, then Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to push the whole board into Motion before kickoff. For related workflows, see how to export completed Motion tasks for billing or batch-update task priorities from an Excel workbook.