The Scenario
You're the head of product and you've just finished a two-day planning session. The output is an Excel workbook with 20 new epics: names, descriptions, which objective each one is tied to, and the label that identifies which product area owns it. The roadmap kickoff with engineering leadership is tomorrow afternoon. Every one of those epics needs to exist in Shortcut before the meeting.
The bad version:
- Open Shortcut. Click "Create Epic." Type the name. Paste the description. Search for the objective ID. Click the label dropdown and type the label. Save.
- Open row 2. Realize the objective IDs in your workbook are names, not IDs. Go to Shortcut, find each objective, copy its ID, paste it back in the workbook. Start over with row 1.
- Get through 8 epics. Discover that two label names have typos and don't match any existing Shortcut labels. Decide to skip them and add labels manually later.
The kickoff is in 18 hours. You have 12 more epics to go and a method that keeps breaking.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the epic data and creates all 20 epics in Shortcut in one operation — writing back the new epic IDs so you have a record.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Bulk-create all 20 epics from my Excel table in Shortcut: name from column A, description from column B, linked objective from column C, and write each new epic ID into column D
What You Get
- A Shortcut epic created for every row
- Each new epic ID written into column D
- Rows where the objective ID didn't match a valid Shortcut objective flagged in column E with the error
- A sidebar summary of how many epics were created
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Objective names instead of IDs in the workbook
Before creating epics, look up each objective name in column C against the list of Shortcut objectives and replace the names with their corresponding IDs. Then create the epics using column A as name, column B as description, the resolved IDs as objective, and column D as label. Write the new epic ID into column E.
Some rows are missing descriptions
For rows where column B is blank, create the Shortcut epic with only the name and objective — skip the description field rather than failing the row. Write the returned epic ID into column D and note "no description" in column E.
Labels need to be created in Shortcut if they don't exist yet
For each unique label value in column D of this workbook, check whether that label exists in Shortcut. If it doesn't, create it. Then create all 20 epics using columns A–D and write each new epic ID into column E.
Create epics and immediately add a comment marking their source
Create a Shortcut epic for each row using name from column A, description from column B, objective ID from column C, and label from column D. After creating each epic, post the comment "Created from Q3 planning session — 2026-05-15" on it. Write the epic ID into column E.
The point is one instruction handles what would otherwise be 20 form fills, each with a lookup step for the objective ID.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your planning workbook before the roadmap kickoff, then ask it to create the epics. See also Bulk Create Shortcut Stories From an Excel workbook or return to the Shortcut integration overview.