Export from JIRA Issues to Excel with attachments

[Michael Andrew]

Hi There

I am using JIRA for requirments management.I tried exporting issues from JIRA to excel but the attachments that were linked to the issues are missing.The attachments appear as embedded objects when I do the export to word.

Does anyone know if it is possible to embed attachments in Excel when an export is done or is this a limitation with JIRA? Some people in our company prefer to use Excel as it enables them to filter and sort requirements

Thanks

Michael

[darylchuah · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael

Currently not possible yet however there are improvement request being raised related on this requirement:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-18482
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-14154

Please feel free to vote on it to increase its popularity and don't forget to add yourself as watcher to receive any latest updates from the developer and also feedback from other customer as well.

Additionally, you may try a third party plugin called Xporter for JIRA, which export issues/search result to word file/pdf. The demo seems to offer a feature whereby exporting to pdf will also attach the the screenshots containing on the issues.

[Midori]

As Renjith pointed out, the Excel fileformat (due to its tabular nature and limitations with embedding) may not be the best choice to support this use case.

PDF View Plugin can do everything you wanted, albeit with PDF documents. This is able to display and embed image type attachments, plus it can embed any other type of attachments!

The PDF format supports the concept of embedding, and the PDF readers handle this really intelligently. You can open the embedded files right in the reader, or even save them for further processing. The JIRA plugin allows exporting all-inclusive snapshots of issues and JQL result sets easily.

I'm not quite sure how to support your "filter and sort" use case, I must admit. I think a better approach could be doing that within JIRA, setting up saved filters and exporting their results. This may be more efficient than massaging the data in Excel.

Read the "embedding attachments in PDF" tutorial, and this is how the result looks in Adobe Reader:

[Mark Biro]

Dear @Michael Andrew ,

With ImpEx you can export your issues to Excel (or HTML) with comments, images or attachments. 

Feel free to give it a try: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215792/impex-import-export-from-to-ms-excel?hosting=server&tab=overview 

Best regards, Mark

[Michael Andrew]

Thank you all for your responses appreciate your help

Thanks Michael

[Xpand IT]

Hi Michael,

We are working in several improvements of Xporter and we are very very interested to understand your needs. If possible, please send me one email (paulo.lopes @ xpand-it.com) with the use cases you are tying to reach.

Thank you.

Cheers,

Paulo Lopes

[Michael Andrew]

Hi Paulo

Thanks for your response.We are using JIRA for requirements and need to include Visio diagrams as well as other digrams that are in jpg format.

I work as a business analyst and tend to create and add diagrams to issues.I know that JIRA does not allow you to copy paste images directly into the text boxes.

That is the reason I wanted to know if the attachments can be embedded in excel.Some people in our company also have a preference for using excel so that the can filter and organise requirements.Thanks

Michael

[Renjith Pillai]

It's tricky as Excel does not really allow to embed an object in a specific row (may be it is possible, but won't it become a mess with all the images and attachments sitting in an Excel row). If you need an extended functionality for exporting, I would suggest to use the REST interfaces and automate the Excel creation using the Excel interfaces (which is pretty easy with .NET) and generate a custom Excel.

Also note that the current export from JIRA is actually not a valid Excel files rather an HTML file renamed as .xls which is accepted by MS Excel with a warning.