The Scenario
The sprint planning meeting is in two hours. Three weeks ago, a product manager ran a workshop with seven stakeholders and captured 35 feature requirements in an Excel workbook: title in column A, description in column B, priority in column C. The file was shared around, commented on, revised, and finally signed off.
It has never touched OneDesk.
You are the one who handles the hand-off between planning and execution. That means creating all 35 requirements in OneDesk before the team opens the planning board and starts assigning work. The PM wants requirement IDs written back into the workbook so the engineering team can reference them in PRs and issue trackers.
The bad version:
- Open OneDesk and navigate to the requirements section of the right project
- Copy the title from the workbook, paste it, copy the description, paste it, set the priority, save
- Go back to the workbook, note the returned requirement ID in column D, and move to the next row
Thirty-five requirements. Four steps each. The priority column uses free-form text from the workshop — "High priority", "P1", "critical", "could do" — and OneDesk wants a normalized priority value, not whatever the stakeholders typed.
The planning meeting starts in two hours and you have a pre-read to finish reviewing first.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the PRD, normalizes the priority values, creates each requirement in OneDesk, and writes the IDs back.
Create a OneDesk requirement for each row in the PRD worksheet: title from column A, description from column B, priority from column C — treat High, P1, and critical as High priority; treat Medium, P2, and could do as Medium; treat everything else as Low. Write the returned requirement ID into column D. Skip any row where column A is blank.
Thirty-five requirements. One prompt. Column D has IDs ready for the planning session.
What You Get
- A OneDesk requirement created for each non-blank row
- Priority normalized from workshop free-form text to OneDesk's expected values
- Requirement IDs written back into column D as each one is created
- Blank rows skipped automatically
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Descriptions are long and contain workshop formatting artifacts
The description column has things like bullet points written as "- item", line breaks from a notes app, and em dashes from a Mac keyboard.
Create OneDesk requirements from the PRD worksheet: title from column A, description from column B — strip leading hyphens or bullets from description text and clean up excessive whitespace before submitting. Normalize priority from column C. Write requirement ID into column D.
Some requirements have dependencies listed in column E
Column E contains the title of another requirement this one depends on. You want to note that in the OneDesk description.
Create OneDesk requirements from the PRD worksheet: title from column A. For the description, use column B — if column E is not blank, append "Depends on: [column E value]" at the end of the description. Normalize priority from column C. Write requirement ID into column D.
The requirements span two worksheets — must-haves and nice-to-haves
Your workbook has a Must Have worksheet and a Nice to Have worksheet. Both need to be imported into the same OneDesk project.
Create OneDesk requirements from both the Must Have and Nice to Have worksheets — same column layout in both: title in A, description in B, priority in C. Normalize priority values. Skip blank rows. Write each returned requirement ID into column D of the worksheet it came from.
Full import with priority normalization, dependency notes, and two worksheets
Create OneDesk requirements from the Must Have and Nice to Have worksheets. Title from column A, description from column B. If column E has a dependency, append "Depends on: [column E]" to the description. Normalize column C: High/P1/critical = High, Medium/P2/could do = Medium, everything else = Low. Skip blank rows. Write requirement ID into column D of the originating worksheet. After both worksheets, write a summary note at the top of Must Have showing total created vs. skipped across both tabs.
Two hours to the meeting, and the board is ready when the team opens it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the PRD workbook from your last planning session — ask it to create all the requirements in OneDesk and write the IDs back before the next sprint kickoff. Also worth reading: how to bulk-create tasks from a sprint plan, and the hub overview of all four methods for connecting OneDesk to Excel.