The Scenario
After a company reorg, your Roam workspace needs 10 new department groups. The org chart changes came from HR as an Excel workbook: department names in column C, employee email addresses in column A, Roam user IDs in column D. Your job is to get Roam's group structure to match before the new reporting lines go live Monday.
It's Saturday morning. You have the workbook. You don't have a script.
The bad version:
- You open Roam's admin console and create the first group manually. The UI takes you through a name field and a member search one person at a time. You add six members to the first group over four minutes.
- You do the math: 10 groups, an average of 12 members each. That's 120 member additions, minimum — all by hand.
- You get through three groups before deciding this is a weekend problem you're not going to solve in the admin console.
There's nothing wrong with the data. The problem is that creating groups from a workbook isn't something Roam's console was designed to do.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the group and member mappings and handles the SCIM group creation and member assignment calls to Roam — without you touching the admin console.
Read the 'Group Setup' Excel sheet where column A has group names and column B has comma-separated Roam user IDs, then create each group and add the listed members
What You Get
- One Roam group created for each unique value in column A
- Every user ID in column B gets added to the corresponding group
- If a group name already exists in Roam, members are added to the existing group rather than creating a duplicate
- Any user ID that fails to add gets flagged with the row number so you can review
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The workbook uses a department column rather than a pre-built group-to-user mapping
For each unique department in column C of the Excel 'Employee Directory' worksheet, create a Roam group if one doesn't exist. Add the Roam user IDs from column D to the matching group. Write the group ID into column E for audit purposes.
You want to verify each group was created before moving on
Create Roam groups from each unique group name in column A of the Excel 'Group Setup' worksheet. After creating each group, write the assigned Roam group ID back into column C next to the first row for that group.
Group names need to be normalized — some have trailing spaces or mixed case
Read the Excel 'Group Setup' worksheet. For each unique value in column A (trim whitespace and normalize to Title Case), create a Roam group if one doesn't already exist. Add each user ID from column B to the matching group.
Full build: create groups, add members, and post a confirmation to a Roam channel
Create Roam groups from column A of the Excel 'Group Setup' worksheet, add user IDs from column B, then post a message to Roam group ID 'it-ops' listing each group name and how many members were added.
One prompt, three steps. SheetXAI handles the sequencing.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook your HR team used to capture the reorg structure, then ask it to create the Roam groups. If you need to clean up access on the other side of the reorg, the group member removal spoke covers that.