The Scenario
The third feature this quarter just got greenlit. You have a standard feature-development checklist that the team has refined over a year — 10 parent tasks, each with 3 to 5 subtasks that capture the actual handoffs. The checklist lives in a Google Sheet. Every time a new feature starts, someone has to clone that checklist into a new TickTick project.
The last time this happened, a junior PM did it by hand. The subtasks for "QA sign-off" ended up as separate top-level tasks. The "Deploy to staging" task lost two of its three subtasks. Nobody noticed until the deployment was already late.
The bad version:
- You open TickTick, create the new project, add the first parent task, then click into it to add its subtasks one by one.
- After the third parent task, you realize you're spending more time on TickTick setup than on the feature brief you're supposed to be writing.
- The PM who inherits the project has to spend their first 30 minutes auditing whether the checklist is complete — because the manual process has never been 100% reliable.
The checklist exists precisely so the team doesn't have to think about what needs to happen. The setup should be automatic.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your checklist template — parent tasks and their associated subtasks — and creates the full structure in a new TickTick project, including every subtask nested correctly under its parent.
Create a TickTick project named after cell A1, then for each row in the 'Template' sheet create a task with the name from column A and subtasks from columns B, C, and D.
What You Get
- A new TickTick project is created with the name from cell A1.
- Each row in the 'Template' sheet becomes a parent task in that project.
- Values in columns B, C, and D for each row become subtasks nested under the correct parent.
- Blank cells in columns B through D are skipped — tasks with fewer than three subtasks are created correctly without empty subtask stubs.
- The task and subtask order matches the row order in the sheet.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The template has variable numbers of subtasks per row
Some parent tasks have 2 subtasks, others have 5, and the column count varies.
Create a TickTick project named after cell A1. For each row in the 'Checklist Template' sheet, create a parent task using column A as the name. Use all non-blank values in columns B through G as subtasks for that parent task.
You want due dates assigned relative to a project start date
The feature launches in three weeks and each task needs a due date calculated from the kick-off date in cell B1.
Create a TickTick project named after cell A2. The project kick-off date is in cell B1. For each row in the 'Template' sheet, create a task named from column A with a due date set to the kick-off date plus the number of days in column E. Add subtasks from columns B, C, and D.
The template needs to be cloned into an existing project, not a new one
The project already exists in TickTick — you just need the checklist added to it.
Read the task template from the 'Checklist Template' sheet — parent task in column A, subtasks in columns B through D — and create all tasks and their subtasks in the TickTick project ID from cell F1.
Full kill chain: validate, create project, create tasks and subtasks, confirm in one shot
Check the 'Template' sheet for rows missing a parent task name in column A and flag them in column E with 'MISSING NAME'. For all valid rows, create a TickTick project named after cell A1. Create each parent task in that project using column A for the name, and add subtasks from columns B, C, and D (skip blanks). Write the returned task ID into column F for each parent task and 'CREATED' into column E. Report any failures in column E.
Build the entire structure in one instruction and get a confirmation row per task — no manual audit after.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the template sheet your team reuses every sprint, then ask it to clone the full task-and-subtask structure into a new TickTick project in one prompt. Also see: bulk-creating flat task lists from a project plan or creating multiple projects at once from a portfolio sheet — or return to the TickTick integration hub.