The Scenario
An agile coach is preparing for the Engineering team's sprint retrospective. Before the retro can be meaningful, the data needs to be in front of the team: every issue from the last completed cycle, with its final state, assignee, and estimate, so the group can calculate velocity and look at completion rate without arguing over what actually shipped.
Linear has all of this. It's just not in a spreadsheet yet.
The bad version:
- Navigate to the Engineering team's cycle history in Linear, find the last completed cycle, scroll through 35 issues, and manually copy identifier, title, state, assignee, estimate, and completion date into a sheet — one row at a time.
- The cycle view in Linear doesn't show all the fields you need on a single screen. Some fields require opening individual tickets.
- Halfway through you realize you forgot the estimate column. Now you either add a new column and re-enter 20 rows, or you accept that the velocity chart will be incomplete.
The retrospective starts in two hours. The coach is supposed to be facilitating, not doing data entry.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It queries Linear for the last completed cycle's issues and writes the full field set into the sheet in one call.
Pull all issues from the most recently completed cycle for the Engineering team and write the identifier, title, state, assignee, estimate, and completed date into this sheet
What You Get
- One row per issue from the last completed Engineering cycle.
- Columns for identifier, title, final state, assignee name, estimate (story points), and completion date.
- Issues that were removed from the cycle mid-sprint are excluded — only what was in the cycle at close.
- A header row is written automatically so the sheet is immediately readable.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need a specific cycle by ID, not the most recent one
The retrospective is for a cycle from two sprints ago, not the latest.
Export every issue from Linear cycle ID in cell A1 into this sheet with columns for identifier, title, final status, and story points
You need velocity broken down by assignee
The coach wants to see completion rate per engineer, not just team totals.
Pull all issues from the most recently completed Engineering cycle into this sheet with identifier, title, state, assignee, and estimate — then add a summary section below the data showing the total story points completed per assignee
The team wants to filter out sub-issues from the velocity count
Only parent issues count toward the sprint velocity. Sub-issues should be visible but excluded from the total.
Pull all issues from the last completed Engineering cycle into this sheet with identifier, title, state, assignee, parent issue identifier, and estimate — flag each row in column G as "parent" or "child" based on whether it has a parent issue
Full retro data dump with analysis
Pull the issues, calculate completion rate, flag incomplete items, and add a summary row.
Pull all issues from the last completed Engineering cycle into this sheet with identifier, title, state, assignee, and estimate — add a column marking whether the final state is "Done" or not, then add a summary row at the bottom showing: total issues, total completed, completion rate percentage, and total story points completed
One prompt produces a retro-ready dataset without anyone spending 40 minutes in Linear before the meeting.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Google Sheet before your next sprint retrospective — then ask it to pull the last completed cycle's data and calculate completion stats inline. Pair this with the cross-project summary guide if you want to roll velocity metrics up across multiple teams.