The Scenario
You are a project manager. It is Monday morning and the sprint kicks off at 10 AM. You planned the entire Q3 sprint in an Excel workbook over the last two weeks — eighty tasks in the Planning tab, with columns for task name, due date, priority, and assignee.
Nobody has touched Todoist yet. Every task still needs to be created.
The bad version of the next two hours:
- You open Todoist and create a new project
- You read row one in Excel, switch apps, type the task name, set the due date, click priority, assign it
- You go back to the workbook, read row two, switch again, repeat
- Around row fifteen you realize a date in the workbook was a relative reference that broke when you closed Excel last night
- Around row thirty-five your mouse hand hurts
- The sprint starts and you are on row forty-seven.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads every row in the Planning tab and creates every Todoist task in one operation, without you touching the Todoist UI at all.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read every row in the Planning tab and create a Todoist task for each one. Use column A as the task name, column B as the due date, column C as priority (map High to p1, Medium to p2, Low to p3), and column D as the assignee. Put them all in a new Todoist project called 'Q3 Roadmap'.
SheetXAI reads all eighty rows, creates the project, normalizes the priority labels, and fires a create request for each task. The sprint is live in Todoist before the standup starts.
What You Get
A fully populated Todoist project with eighty tasks, each one carrying:
- Task name — from column A, verbatim
- Due date — parsed from column B, normalized to Todoist's format
- Priority — mapped from your text labels to Todoist's p1–p4 scale
- Assignee — matched to your Todoist workspace collaborators
Tasks with blank assignees get flagged, not dropped. SheetXAI writes "UNASSIGNED" into column E for any row where the assignee could not be matched, so you can see the gap before the sprint starts.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Sprint workbooks are rarely clean on sprint day.
When priority values are inconsistent across rows
Some rows say "High," some say "high," some say "1," and some are blank.
Normalize column C: map 'High', 'high', '1', and 'urgent' to p1; 'Medium', 'medium', '2' to p2; 'Low', 'low', '3' to p3; blanks to p4. Then create all Todoist tasks in a new project called 'Q3 Roadmap' using columns A, B, and D.
When due dates are stored as relative labels
The workbook has "Week 1," "Week 2," etc. instead of real dates.
Parse the due dates in column B: treat 'Week 1' as 2026-07-06, 'Week 2' as 2026-07-13, and so on through 'Week 13'. For cells with specific month-day dates like 'Aug 15', parse them directly. Then create all Todoist tasks in 'Q3 Roadmap'.
When only critical-path tasks should go to Todoist first
You want p1 and p2 tasks in Todoist immediately. The rest can wait until next week.
Filter to rows in the Planning tab where column C is p1 or p2 (or 'High' or 'Urgent'). Create those tasks in a new Todoist project called 'Q3 Roadmap — Critical Path'. Write 'Sent to Todoist' into column F for included rows and 'Pending' for skipped rows.
When the workbook covers multiple projects in separate tabs
The Planning workbook has three tabs: Q3-Engineering, Q3-Marketing, Q3-Design.
For each of the Q3-Engineering, Q3-Marketing, and Q3-Design tabs, create a separate Todoist project with the tab name as the project name. Read the tasks from each tab using column A (name), column B (due date), and column C (priority). Write the Todoist project ID into column G of each tab.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the workbook first and then switching to Todoist, you describe the mapping and the normalization in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sprint plan workbook, then ask it to push every row to Todoist. The Todoist integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For the reverse direction, see how to export active Todoist tasks into an Excel workbook or the Todoist in Excel overview.