The Scenario
You are an operations manager. Your company is relocating offices in six weeks. You have an Excel workbook with the entire relocation plan — 60 tasks across five departments in the Planning tab: IT, Facilities, HR, Legal, and Finance.
You need the whole thing in Todoist today so each department lead can track their own work.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- You open Todoist and create a new project
- You create the IT section, then add twelve tasks one by one, reading from the workbook after each one
- You make the Facilities section, add nine tasks
- Around task thirty, you accidentally put a Finance task under HR because you switched between windows too fast
- You spend the last hour correcting section assignments instead of doing actual relocation work.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the entire plan, scaffolds the Todoist project with all five sections, and loads every task into the right section in one operation.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a new Todoist project called 'Office Relocation'. Create sections for each unique value in the 'Section' column of the Planning tab. Then create all tasks from the Planning tab assigned to the correct section, using the 'Task' column for task name and the 'Due Date' column for due dates.
SheetXAI reads the Planning tab, identifies the five unique department names, creates the project with all five sections, and adds each of the sixty tasks to the right section.
What You Get
A fully scaffolded Todoist project:
- 5 sections — IT, Facilities, HR, Legal, Finance, built from the unique values in the Section column
- 60 tasks — each sitting in its correct section
- Due dates — applied to each task from the workbook
Tasks land in the right sections without you touching a single section assignment manually. Department leads can open Todoist immediately and see exactly their list.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Relocation planning workbooks change constantly up until launch day.
When section names in the workbook are inconsistent
Some rows say "IT," some say "Information Technology," one row says "it."
Normalize the Section column of the Planning tab: map 'Information Technology' and 'it' to 'IT', 'Facilities Management' to 'Facilities', and so on. Then create the Todoist project 'Office Relocation' with sections from the normalized values and all 60 tasks in their correct sections.
When tasks need to be assigned to specific people
You have an Assignee column but only some rows are filled in.
Create the Todoist project 'Office Relocation' with one section per unique department in the Planning tab. For each task, assign it to the person in the Assignee column if the cell is not empty. Leave others unassigned. Write the created Todoist task ID into column F for each row.
When blocked tasks need visible dependency notes
Ten tasks have a 'Depends On' column noting which other task must finish first.
Create the Todoist project 'Office Relocation' with sections and tasks from the Planning tab. For any task with a value in the 'Depends On' column, add a comment to that Todoist task saying 'Blocked by: [dependency name]'. Write all tasks and comments in one pass.
When the same template covers two locations
You are running this relocation for two sites — Chicago and Austin. The workbook has a Location column.
Filter to rows where Location is 'Chicago' in the Planning tab. Create a Todoist project 'Office Relocation — Chicago' with sections and tasks from those rows. Then do the same for 'Austin' in a project called 'Office Relocation — Austin'.
The pattern: the structure lives in the workbook. SheetXAI reads it and builds the Todoist project to match.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any project plan workbook with a department or section column, then ask it to scaffold the Todoist project. The Todoist integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For the simpler create workflow, see how to bulk-create tasks without sections from Excel or the Todoist in Excel overview.