The Scenario
A senior engineer broke down an epic over the weekend. ENG-204 is the parent issue — a broad feature that the team agreed to tackle this quarter. The breakdown lives in a Google Sheet: 12 rows, each with a sub-task title and a short description. The engineers are expecting those child issues to exist in Linear when they sit down for refinement on Tuesday morning.
The bad version:
- Open Linear, navigate to ENG-204, find the "Add sub-issue" option, type the first sub-task title, paste the description, save.
- Repeat 11 more times. Each sub-issue creation requires clicking back into the parent ticket to find the sub-issue section, which collapses after every save.
- After the fourth or fifth sub-issue you start abbreviating the descriptions to save time. By issue 10 you've skipped the description entirely for two of them.
The breakdown that took two hours of careful thinking on Sunday afternoon is now half-entered and inconsistent because the UI made the last four entries painful.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads each row of your breakdown sheet and creates all the child issues under the parent you specify — preserving every title and description exactly as written.
Create a child issue under Linear issue ENG-204 for each row in this sheet using column A as the title and column B as the description
What You Get
- 12 child issues created under ENG-204, each with the exact title and description from the sheet.
- Sub-issues appear in Linear's parent issue view in the same order as the rows.
- Rows with blank descriptions create issues without a description rather than failing.
- A confirmation with the count of child issues created and their identifiers.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The parent issue identifier is in a cell, not hardcoded
You run this workflow for multiple epics and want the prompt to read the parent from the sheet.
Create a child issue under the Linear issue identifier in cell A1 for each row starting at row 3, using column B as the title and column C as the description
Sub-issues need to be assigned to specific engineers at creation
Column C in the sheet has the assignee email for each task.
Create a child issue under ENG-204 for each row in this sheet using column A as the title, column B as the description, and assign each to the Linear user with the email in column C
Some rows are marked as not ready
The breakdown sheet has a status column. Only rows marked "ready" should become tickets.
Create a child issue under ENG-204 for every row where column C says "ready", using column A as the title and column B as the description
Full epic breakdown in one shot
Read the parent identifier, filter ready rows, assign engineers, and write back the created identifiers.
Create a child issue under the Linear issue in cell A1 for every row below row 2 where column D says "ready": use column A as the title, column B as the description, and assign to the email in column C — write the new sub-issue identifier into column E for each row
One prompt takes a Sunday-night planning document and turns it into a complete set of actionable tickets by Tuesday morning.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a task breakdown — sub-task titles, descriptions, optional assignees — then ask it to create all the child issues under a parent issue in Linear. See the bulk-update guide if you need to assign and prioritize those sub-issues after creating them.