Key takeaway
A migration that requires manually retyping every row is a migration most teams quietly abandon halfway through.
The single biggest reason teams keep postponing a move off a spreadsheet, even after admitting it is not working anymore, is the dread of retyping everything by hand into a new system. That dread is well founded if the new tool has no real import path, but it is entirely avoidable if it does. A migration does not have to mean recreating months of task history from scratch.
Decide what's actually worth bringing over
Not everything in an old spreadsheet deserves to survive the move. Tasks that are already done are historical record, not active work, they rarely need to exist in the new tool at all. What's worth migrating is what is still open: active tasks, their current owners and due dates, milestones still ahead, and any dependency or risk that is still live. Being selective here turns a sprawling multi-tab spreadsheet into a much shorter, much more manageable import.
Let the import do the tedious part
Once you know what's actually moving over, a real bulk import, uploading the CSV or Excel file directly rather than retyping its contents, should bring in the task list in minutes, flagging anything it could not confidently match, like an owner listed by a nickname the roster does not recognize, instead of silently guessing or dropping it. The same principle applies to the plan itself: if the old project has a proposal, a brief, or a planning document describing scope and milestones, AI can read that document directly and draft a first structured version for you to review, rather than you retyping a plan you already wrote once into a new set of fields.