The Scenario
You're a product manager who wrote a full feature spec in Excel. It made sense at the time — rows for each section heading, the body text next to it in column B, stakeholder notes in column C. Now the spec needs to live in Shortcut as a proper document, linked to the epic, so engineers can reference it while they're working on the stories.
The bad version:
- Open the Shortcut document editor. Click "New Doc."
- Go back to the workbook. Copy the first heading. Paste it. Format it as a heading in the doc. Copy the body text for that section. Paste it. Repeat for each row.
- Reach row 28 and realize the Shortcut doc editor stripped your line breaks on paste. Fix them manually for each section.
- Link the finished doc to the epic. Realize you linked to the wrong epic because you had two tabs open.
You spent two hours creating a document that already existed in your workbook.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the spec content, formats it as markdown, creates the Shortcut document, and links it to the epic — in one prompt.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Convert the text content in my Excel worksheet into a new Shortcut document using the title in cell A1 and body text in column B, then associate it with the epic ID in cell C1
What You Get
- A new Shortcut document created with each row's heading formatted as an H2 and body text as paragraph content
- The document linked to the epic ID in cell C1
- The returned document URL written into cell D1 so you have a direct link
- The document formatted as valid markdown that renders correctly in the Shortcut doc viewer
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The title should come from the workbook, not a hardcoded value
Take the spec title from cell A1, and the content from rows 3–50 (column A as heading, column B as body text). Create a Shortcut document using A1 as the title, format the body as markdown, and link it to the epic ID in cell B1. Write the returned doc URL into cell C1.
Some rows are subheadings that should be H3 rather than H2
For rows 2–50, if column C says "sub", format the heading in column A as H3 in the markdown. If column C is blank or says "main", format it as H2. Create the Shortcut document with this mixed heading structure and link it to epic ID in cell D1.
The document should include a table from a separate worksheet
Create a Shortcut document using the heading and body content from rows 2–40 of the Spec worksheet. At the end of the document, include a markdown table built from the Estimates worksheet (columns A–D). Link the document to the epic ID in Spec!D1.
Full pipeline: build the spec doc, then comment on the epic that it's ready
Take content from rows 2–50 (column A heading, column B body), create a Shortcut document titled from cell A1, link it to epic ID in cell D1. Then post the comment "Feature spec is now attached — review before sprint planning" on the epic. Write the document URL into cell E1.
The key is that the spec was already written — you just needed it in a different place, in a different format.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with structured spec content, then ask it to create the document. See also Bulk Create Shortcut Epics From an Excel workbook or return to the Shortcut integration overview.