The Scenario
After a company reorg, your Roam workspace needs 10 new department groups. The org chart changes came from HR as a Google Sheet: department names in column C, employee email addresses in column A, Roam user IDs in column D. Your job is to get Roam's group structure to match before the new reporting lines go live Monday.
It's Saturday morning. You have the sheet. You don't have a script.
The bad version:
- You open Roam's admin console and create the first group manually. The UI takes you through a name field and a member search one person at a time. You add six members to the first group over four minutes.
- You do the math: 10 groups, an average of 12 members each. That's 120 member additions, minimum — all by hand.
- You get through three groups before deciding this is a weekend problem you're not going to solve in the admin console.
There's nothing wrong with the data. The problem is that creating groups from a sheet isn't something Roam's console was designed to do.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the group and member mappings and handles the SCIM group creation and member assignment calls to Roam — without you touching the admin console.
Create a Roam group for each unique department name in column C of the 'Employee Directory' sheet, then add the corresponding Roam user IDs from column D to each group
What You Get
- One Roam group created for each unique value in column C
- Every user ID in column D gets added to the group matching their column C department
- If a group name already exists in Roam, members are added to the existing group rather than creating a duplicate
- Any user ID that fails to add gets flagged with the row number so you can review
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The sheet has user IDs missing for some employees — you need to look them up first
For each row in the 'Employee Directory' sheet where column D is empty, look up the Roam user ID using the email in column A and write it into column D. Then create a group for each unique department in column C and add the user IDs to their matching group.
You want to verify each group was created before moving on
Create Roam groups from each unique department name in column C of the 'Employee Directory' sheet. After creating each group, write the assigned Roam group ID back into a new column E next to the first row for that department. Then add the user IDs from column D to each group.
Group names need to be normalized — some have trailing spaces or mixed case
Read the 'Employee Directory' sheet. For each unique value in column C (trim whitespace and normalize to Title Case), create a Roam group if one doesn't already exist. Add each user ID from column D to the matching group. Write the group ID into column E for audit purposes.
Full build: create groups, add members, and post a confirmation message to a Roam channel
Create Roam groups from column C of the 'Employee Directory' sheet, add user IDs from column D, then post a message to Roam group ID 'it-ops' listing each group name and how many members were added.
One prompt, three steps. SheetXAI handles the sequencing.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet your HR team used to capture the reorg structure, then ask it to create the Roam groups. If you need to clean up access on the other side of the reorg, the group member removal spoke covers that.