The Scenario
It's the Monday before sprint planning. You're a product manager at a SaaS startup, and you've spent the past two weeks collecting backlog items from four different sources: engineering requests, customer feedback, a CEO brain dump, and your own notes. They're all in an Excel workbook now — 120 rows, columns for name, description, story type, and the workflow state where each item should land.
The bad version:
- Open Shortcut's story creation form and start typing row 1. Name. Description. Click the type dropdown. Click the workflow state dropdown. Save.
- Move to row 2. Realize you used the wrong workflow state for the first six rows. Go back and fix them.
- Reach row 40 and notice your description column has some cells with line breaks that don't survive the paste. Decide to just delete them and move on.
The sprint planning session starts in three hours. Manually creating 120 stories isn't a plan — it's a different job than the one you were hired for.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the data, understands the structure, and through its Shortcut integration it can create all 120 stories in one operation. No form fills, no dropdown navigation.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Add all 120 items in my Excel table to Shortcut as stories in workflow state 500, using column A as name and column B as description, then paste each new story ID into column C
What You Get
- A Shortcut story created for every row in the workbook
- Each new story ID written back into column C
- Rows where the story type or workflow state ID is invalid flagged in column D with the error reason
- A summary in the sidebar showing how many stories were created and how many rows had issues
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some rows have the story type spelled differently than Shortcut expects
Before creating stories, normalize the values in column C — map any variation of "Feature", "feat", or "new feature" to "feature", "Bug" or "defect" to "bug", and "chore", "task", or "tech debt" to "chore" — then create the stories
The workflow state IDs are missing for some rows
For rows in this workbook where column D is blank, look up the workflow state named in column E against the Shortcut workflow for the default team, get the matching state ID, fill it into column D, then create the stories using column D as the workflow state
Story names and descriptions are split across two worksheets
Join data from the Backlog worksheet (columns A and B for story name and type) and the Descriptions worksheet (column A as story name, column B as description — use story name as the join key) and create a Shortcut story for each matched row, writing the new story ID back into the Backlog worksheet column C
Full cleanup plus story creation in one shot
In column A, trim leading and trailing spaces from all story names. In column C, normalize story types to shortcut-valid values (feature/bug/chore). Skip any row where column A is blank. Then create a Shortcut story for each valid row and write the returned story ID into column D, flagging any API errors in column E.
The pattern is cleanup and creation in a single instruction — you don't have to pre-clean the workbook before you can use it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your sprint backlog workbook — even a rough one — then ask it to create the stories. Link to the sibling article: Export Shortcut Iteration Stories to an Excel workbook, or return to the Shortcut integration overview.