The Scenario
The project delivery director has been tasked with rolling out a new taxonomy before the team starts tracking time next Monday. Fifteen labels, organized by service line, with specific color coding so different types of work are visually distinct in the Timely interface. The names and hex codes are already in a Excel workbook — someone spent two hours building the taxonomy document. Now they just need to exist in Timely.
The bad version:
- Open Timely, navigate to labels, click "New label"
- Type the first label name, pick the color (find the closest hex match in the color picker), save
- Click "New label" again, type the second name, pick the color, save
- Repeat 13 more times, wondering why you're doing this manually when the data is already in an Excel workbook
Fifteen labels through the UI is about 20 minutes of click work — if you don't make any mistakes. The kind of work that feels beneath the role but still has to get done.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your workbook and through its built-in Timely integration it can create all 15 labels in one operation — no form-clicking, no color picker hunting.
Create a Timely label for each row in my Taxonomy worksheet using the name in column A and the hex color code in column B
What You Get
- Timely receives a create-label call for each row in the workbook
- Column C fills with the new label ID if successful, or an error message if something failed (duplicate name, invalid hex code)
- All 15 labels created in one pass, live in Timely before the team starts tracking
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some color values are color names rather than hex codes
Create a Timely label for each row in my Taxonomy worksheet — convert any color name in column B to its hex equivalent (e.g., "blue" to #0000FF), then create the label using the name in column A and the converted color
You need to create labels with parent-child relationships
Create the labels in my Taxonomy worksheet in two passes: first create any row where column C is blank (top-level labels), writing the new ID into column D — then create rows where column C has a parent label name, looking up the parent's ID from column D to set the relationship
Some label names already exist in Timely
Create a Timely label for each row in my Taxonomy worksheet — if a label with the same name already exists, skip it and write "exists" into column C; if it's new, create it and write the new ID into column C
Full taxonomy rollout in one pass
In my Taxonomy worksheet: skip any row where column A is blank, check if each label name already exists in Timely and skip duplicates, create all new labels using name from column A and hex color from column B, write the label ID into column C for new labels and "exists" for skipped ones, and flag any failures in column D
The pattern: include the duplicate check and the create together so you're not creating labels twice or discovering conflicts after the fact.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the workbook with your label taxonomy, then ask it to create all labels in Timely. For auditing the labels that already exist first, see the spoke on exporting Timely labels.