The Scenario
The HR operations lead got her marching orders Monday morning: before Thursday's quarterly planning session, every team needs a workspace in Timely so managers can start assigning projects immediately. She has 8 department names in a Google Sheet — column A, one per row — and a color code for each in column B. The department heads are already expecting access by end of day Wednesday.
The bad version:
- Open Timely's team management section, click "New team," type the first department name, pick the color, save
- Go back to the team list, click "New team" again, type the second name, pick the color, save
- Repeat six more times while keeping one eye on the sheet so you don't transpose names or use the wrong color for the wrong team
Eight teams is not a huge number. It's enough that doing it through the UI feels like unnecessary manual work when the data is already sitting neatly in a spreadsheet.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your sheet and through its built-in Timely integration it can create all 8 teams in a single operation — no clicking through the creation form, no tab-switching.
Create a Timely team for each name in column A of my Teams tab — use the color code in column B for each team
What You Get
- Timely receives a create-team call for each row in the sheet
- Column C fills with the new team ID if successful, or an error message if something failed (duplicate name, invalid color)
- All 8 teams created in one pass, ready for managers to use before the planning session
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some color codes are missing
Create a Timely team for each row in column A of my Teams tab — use the color in column B if it's present, default to green if column B is blank
Team names have inconsistent formatting
Clean up the team names in column A of my Teams tab — trim whitespace and apply title case — then create a Timely team for each one using the cleaned name and the color in column B
You need to assign a team lead to each team after creation
Create a Timely team for each row in my Teams tab using column A for the name and column B for the color — then assign the user ID in column C as the team lead for each new team, writing the new team ID into column D
Full team setup in one pass
In my Teams tab: trim whitespace from column A, skip any blank rows, create a Timely team for each remaining row using the name in column A and color in column B, assign the manager email in column C as the team lead, write the new team ID into column D, and flag any errors in column E
The pattern: run the data cleanup and the team creation together rather than fixing the sheet first and then running a second pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the sheet with your department list, then ask it to create all the teams in Timely. For adding users to those teams afterward, see the spoke on exporting the Timely user list.