The Scenario
You're a project manager closing out a legacy product that's been retired. The workspace is full of archived stories from the old project — 200 of them — and they need to be permanently deleted before the workspace gets reorganized. You've already pulled the story IDs into an Excel workbook. Now comes the part where you actually remove them.
The bad version:
- Open Shortcut. Navigate to the archived stories view. Search for the first ID in the list.
- Click the story. Find the delete option buried in the three-dot menu. Confirm deletion.
- Search for the next ID. Realize the search is slow and requires you to navigate back to archived stories first each time.
- Get to story 40 and realize you accidentally deleted one story that was archived but still being referenced by another team's active epic.
Two hundred individual deletions, each one a navigation exercise, each one a potential mistake.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the story IDs and calls the Shortcut bulk delete endpoint — writing back a confirmation for each successful deletion.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Permanently remove all 200 Shortcut story IDs in my Excel table using the bulk delete operation and mark each row's Status column as "deleted"
What You Get
- Each story ID in the table permanently deleted from Shortcut
- "deleted" written into the Status column for each successful deletion
- Rows where the story ID was invalid, not found, or not in archived state flagged with the reason
- A sidebar count of how many deletions succeeded and how many had errors
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to verify stories are actually archived before deleting them
For each story ID in column A, check whether the Shortcut story is in an archived state. If it is, delete it and write "deleted" in column B. If it isn't archived, write "skipped — not archived" in column B and do not delete it.
You want to process in batches of 50 to stay within API limits
Delete Shortcut story IDs in column A in batches of 50, pausing between batches. Write "deleted" into column B as each story is removed and note any errors in column C.
You need to log which epic each story was linked to before deletion
For each story ID in column A, retrieve the story's epic association before deleting it. Write the epic name into column B. Then delete the story and write "deleted" in column C. If the story has no epic, write "no epic" in column B.
Delete stories and update a tracking column with the deletion date
Delete all Shortcut story IDs in column A. For each successful deletion, write "deleted" in column B and today's date in column C. For any errors, write the error reason in column B and leave column C blank.
The critical safety feature here is the Status column log — it shows you exactly what was deleted and what was skipped.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your archived story ID workbook, then ask it to run the deletions. See also Bulk Update Shortcut Stories From an Excel workbook or return to the Shortcut integration overview.