The Scenario
Sprint planning is in two hours. You are the engineering support lead and the engineering manager just sent you a message: she needs a list of every open Plain thread that has a linked Jira or Linear issue, with the issue URL, so the team can add them to the sprint backlog. There are 80 threads. Some have multiple issue links.
You have never exported this data from Plain before. You are about to find out what that involves.
The bad version:
- Open Plain, find the thread list, filter by open, click into thread one, scroll to the linked issues panel, copy the issue URL.
- Switch to your workbook, paste it, add the thread title and customer email from memory, switch back to Plain.
- Realize thread 12 has three linked issues and your workbook only has one row per thread, so now you need to rethink the entire structure.
Sprint planning starts in two hours. Rebuilding your workbook structure while manually copying 80 threads and their issue links is not a plan.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It connects to Plain through its built-in integration, fetches every open thread and expands its linked external issues, and writes one row per issue link — so threads with multiple links get multiple rows automatically.
Pull all open Plain threads and expand their linked external issues into this worksheet — one row per issue link with thread ID (A), thread title (B), customer email (C), and issue URL (D)
What You Get
- One row per issue link across all open threads
- Column A: Thread ID
- Column B: Thread title
- Column C: Customer email on the thread
- Column D: Issue URL (the Jira or Linear link)
- Threads with no linked issues are either included with blank issue columns or omitted, depending on what you specify
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need the issue type column too
For each open thread in Plain, fetch its linked external issues and write thread title (A), customer email (B), issue URL (C), and issue type (D) into one row per issue link in this worksheet
You want to separate Jira links from Linear links into different columns
Fetch all open Plain threads with linked external issues — write thread title (A) and customer email (B) — then write any Jira issue URL to column C and any Linear issue URL to column D, leaving the column blank if that type of link is not present for that thread
You only want threads that have at least one linked issue
Pull all open Plain threads, filter to only those with at least one linked external issue, and write thread title (A), customer email (B), issue URL (C), and created date (D) — one row per issue link
Fetch all open threads, expand issue links, flag threads with more than two links, deduplicate issue URLs that appear on multiple threads, and count unique issues in cell F1
Pull all open Plain threads and expand their linked issues into this worksheet with thread ID (A), thread title (B), customer email (C), issue URL (D) — in column E write multiple links for any thread that appears more than twice — deduplicate column D so each issue URL appears only once, and write the count of unique issue URLs in cell F1
The pattern is to ask for the expansion, the filtering, and the annotation in a single request.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook, then ask it to pull your Plain thread-to-issue mapping before your next sprint planning session. You can also export the full open thread list without issue links or audit your customer groups to see which tiers are generating the most linked issues.