The Scenario
Q3 capacity planning is locked. A resource manager has an Excel workbook with 40 rows: each row has a user GID, a project GID, a start date, an end date, and hours per week. All of it needs to exist in Asana as resource allocations before the quarter begins.
She's used Asana's resource management UI for smaller teams. For 40 allocations across 12 projects, clicking through the interface means navigating to each project's resource view, finding the team member, dragging the allocation block, setting the effort level. The math on that is somewhere between an hour and an afternoon depending on how cooperative the interface feels.
The bad version:
- Open Asana, navigate to the Portfolios > Workload view.
- Find team member 1, drag an allocation block for project 1, set the start date, the end date, the hours per week.
- Go to team member 2 and repeat.
- Realize you've been setting "hours per day" instead of "hours per week" for the last six rows and have to go back and fix them.
Capacity planning is a quarterly exercise that compounds in complexity every time the team grows. Building allocations by hand through a drag interface is a ceiling — it doesn't scale beyond a certain team size.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the allocation parameters from your table and creates all 40 Asana resource allocations in one operation.
For each row in this sheet, create an Asana allocation using the user GID in column A, parent project GID in column B, start date in column C, end date in column D, and effort (hours per week) in column E.
What You Get
- All 40 allocations created in Asana with the correct user, project, date range, and effort values
- Column F receives the new allocation GID for each successful row
- Rows that fail — invalid user GID, project not found, overlapping allocation conflict — get the specific error written into column F instead
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Start and end dates are stored as text in MM/DD/YYYY format
For each row in this sheet, convert the dates in columns C and D from MM/DD/YYYY text to ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD), then create an Asana allocation using user GID in column A, project GID in column B, converted start date, converted end date, and hours per week in column E. Write the allocation GID or error into column F.
Some rows are for team members who aren't in the Asana workspace yet
For each row in this sheet, attempt to create an Asana allocation using columns A through E. If the user GID in column A doesn't correspond to a valid workspace member, write "User not found" in column F and skip that row. For successful rows, write the new allocation GID.
Effort is stored as total hours for the period instead of hours per week, and needs to be converted
For each row in this sheet, calculate the hours per week by dividing the total hours in column E by the number of weeks between the dates in columns C and D (round to one decimal). Then create an Asana allocation with user GID from column A, project GID from column B, dates from columns C and D, and the calculated hours per week. Write the allocation GID or error into column F.
Validate all GIDs, create allocations, and summarize capacity utilization per user in one prompt
Check that each user GID in column A and project GID in column B exist in Asana before creating allocations. For valid rows, create the allocation using columns C, D, and E and write the GID into column F. For invalid rows, write the specific error. After all rows are processed, write a summary to the 'Summary' sheet: one row per unique user GID showing their total allocated hours across all projects in this batch.
Validation, creation, and utilization summary in a single pass — ready for the capacity review meeting.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your Q3 capacity planning workbook — ask SheetXAI to create all 40 Asana allocations before the quarter kicks off. You can also look at how to pull completed task data for velocity analysis, or return to the Asana hub for the full list of available workflows.