The Scenario
Your team just finished sprint planning. You are the engineering lead. There is an Excel workbook with 20 feature rows — feature name, target list, and up to eight acceptance criteria in adjacent columns. Every row needs to become a Trello card with a populated checklist. The sprint starts Monday.
The bad version:
- Create the first card. Open it. Click 'Add Checklist'. Name it. Type criteria one from column C. Type criteria two. Check for blanks in column E. Column F is empty — stop there. Close. Go back to Excel.
- Twenty rows. Each with a variable number of criteria. You'll miscount the column boundary on at least two of them.
The workbook is the planning artifact. It's structured, it's clean, and it already has exactly the data that should be in the Trello checklists. Retyping it by hand is the only step that adds zero value.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the rows, counts the non-empty criteria columns, and creates each card with the checklist pre-populated.
Create Trello cards for every row in this Excel sheet where column A is not blank. Name each card from column A, then add a checklist 'Definition of Done' with the items listed in columns C, D, E, and F.
What You Get
- One Trello card per non-blank row in column A.
- A 'Definition of Done' checklist added to each card with one item per non-empty cell in columns C through F.
- Cards placed in the list whose ID or name appears in column B.
- A confirmation written into column G (or similar) showing the card ID.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Acceptance criteria extend past column F into G and H for some rows
For each row in this workbook where column A is not blank, create a Trello card using column A as name and column B as list ID. Add a checklist 'Acceptance Criteria' with one item per non-empty cell in columns C through J.
The list in column B is a name, not an ID
Before creating cards, resolve the list names in column B to list IDs on the Trello board named 'Engineering Sprint'. Then create the cards and checklists as specified, using the resolved list IDs.
You want a second fixed checklist on every card
For each row in this workbook, create a Trello card with name from column A and list ID from column B. Add two checklists: 'Acceptance Criteria' with items from columns C through J (skip blanks), and 'Definition of Done' with these fixed items: Code reviewed, Tests passing, Deployed to staging, Docs updated.
Clean up the workbook, deduplicate, create cards with checklists, and confirm
Remove duplicate rows based on column A. For all remaining non-blank rows, create a Trello card using column A as name and column B as list ID. Add checklist 'Acceptance Criteria' with non-blank items from columns C through J. Write 'created' into column K and the new card ID into column L.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with feature or story rows that have sub-items in adjacent columns, then ask it to create the cards and checklists in one go. Also useful: Bulk create Trello cards from an Excel workbook or the Trello integration overview.