The Scenario
The sprint kickoff call is in 90 minutes. Your project manager sent you a 60-row Excel workbook — task names in column A, due dates in column B, story points in column C, assignees in column D — exported from whatever planning tool the team used last quarter. All of it needs to be in OneDesk before the call so the team can actually work from it.
This is not your first time doing this. You did the same thing last quarter, manually, and it took two hours and a typo in the due date for a high-stakes deliverable that nobody caught until day three of the sprint.
The bad version:
- Open OneDesk, navigate to the project, and create each task one at a time from the workbook
- For every row with a due date in column B, switch the datepicker to match the format OneDesk expects (which is not the same as the Excel export format)
- Skip rows where column A is blank because the planner left placeholder rows in the export — but remember which ones you skipped so the row count still makes sense
This time you also need to capture the OneDesk task ID for each row. The delivery lead wants them for linking tasks to a risk register that lives in a separate workbook.
Someone has to do this, and right now it's you. But 90 minutes is not enough time to do it carefully by hand.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the sprint plan, understands the column structure, and through its built-in OneDesk integration creates every task in the right project. You tell it once.
Read the Sprint Plan worksheet and create one OneDesk task per row: task name from column A, due date from column B, skip any row where column A is blank. Write the returned task ID into column E.
Sixty tasks. One prompt. The blank placeholder rows get skipped automatically.
What You Get
- A OneDesk task created for each non-blank row in the Sprint Plan worksheet
- Due dates passed exactly as they appear in column B
- Task IDs written back into column E as each one is created
- A final count of how many were created successfully versus skipped
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The due dates are in mixed formats
Some rows have dates like "2026-06-01", others have "June 1", and a few have "1/6/26". OneDesk expects ISO 8601.
Create OneDesk tasks from the Sprint Plan worksheet: task name from column A, due date from column B — normalize all date formats to YYYY-MM-DD before submitting. Skip rows where column A is blank. Write task ID into column E.
The assignee column uses display names, not OneDesk user IDs
Column D has names like "Jordan Kim" and "Alex Rivera" but OneDesk needs user IDs.
Create OneDesk tasks from the Sprint Plan worksheet: task name from column A, due date from column B. For the assignee in column D, look up the matching OneDesk user by display name and assign the task to them. If no match is found, create the task unassigned and note the unmatched name in column F. Write the task ID into column E.
The plan spans two worksheets — this sprint and next sprint
You have a This Sprint worksheet and a Next Sprint worksheet. Both need to be imported into the same OneDesk project.
Create OneDesk tasks from both the This Sprint and Next Sprint worksheets — same column layout in both: task name in A, due date in B. Skip blank rows in both. Write each task ID back into column E of the worksheet it came from.
Full cleanup pass before the call
Bad date formats, unresolved assignees, two worksheets, and you need a pass count at the end.
Create OneDesk tasks from the This Sprint and Next Sprint worksheets. Task name from column A, due date from column B (normalize to YYYY-MM-DD). Match assignee in column D to OneDesk users by display name; create unassigned if no match and log the name in column F. Skip rows where column A is blank. Write task ID into column E. After finishing both worksheets, add a note at the top of each showing how many tasks were created vs. skipped.
One prompt. Both worksheets. The kickoff call starts in 90 minutes and you have something better to do than data entry.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the sprint plan your team exported before the next kickoff — tell it to create the tasks, normalize the dates, and write the IDs back. Also worth reading: how to bulk-create support tickets from a migration workbook, and the hub overview of all four methods for connecting OneDesk to Excel.