Exporting Jira projects to Excel for analysis and reporting is indispensable for teams that are managing hundreds or even thousands of projects. Unfortunately, Jira doesn't offer a core feature to export projects to Excel.
Thanks to Better Excel Exporter, you can do that with a single click. This tutorial explains how.
We will use a custom XLSX template to bring Jira projects to Excel for data migration, searching, filtering and reporting purposes. The export will contain all the active and archived projects which are available in the Jira instance.
This is a great example for using Better Excel Exporter to export non-issue-related information from Jira to Excel.
Jira project export to Excel
Follow these steps:
- Install the Better Excel Exporter app.
- Since Better Excel Exporter 5.1.0, there is a view named "Projects (Excel)" created by default.
(For earlier versions: follow this upgrade guide.)
To reduce the clutter in the UI, this view is disabled by default.
Enable it to activate the project export feature:
- Login to Jira as admin.
- Go to Administration → Manage apps → Excel Views.
- Click the view "Projects (Excel)".
- Check the context "Issue Navigator" and save your changes.
- Go to the Issue Navigator, and a new option named "Projects (Excel)" will appear in the "Export" dropdown. Click that, and your spreadsheet gets downloaded.
Congratulations!
Note that the output (the project data) does not depend on the issues you are looking at in the Issue Navigator. Regardless which screen you add the "Projects" export option to (Issue Details, Issue Navigator, etc.), it exports all projects and their details.
What project information is exported?
The Excel spreadsheet contains the following information for each project:
- Project (name of the project)
- Key
- Status (Active / Archived)
- Project type (since Jira 7.0.0)
- Project Lead (user name of the lead)
- Project category (since Jira 7.2.0)
- URL
- Description
- Last issue update (filled only for active projects, since Jira 7.11.0)
- Issues (number of issues, filled only for active projects, since Jira 7.11.0)
- Components (list of components used in the project)
- Issue types (list of issue types used in the project)
- Versions (list of versions used in the project)
- Archived date (exported for archived projects only, since Jira 7.10.0)
- Archived by (user name of the archiver, exported for archived projects only, since Jira 7.10.0)
Can I customize the project export?
Yes!
Note that this export is created using these resources:
- The Excel template project-export.xlsx which you can freely customize. You can add or remove columns, change the spreadsheet structure and formatting, as explained in the general customization guide.
- The Groovy script project-export.groovy" is used to access the additional information to export (last issue update, number of issues, archiving details). You can also modify this script to your needs.
Working with Jira projects in Excel
Here is a couple of frequent project data related problems and their solutions in Excel.
Even if the suggested solution is not 100% applicable to your use case, it should give you some inspiration. (Excel is insanely powerful, be creative and use Google!)
Migrating project data to an external application
Post-process the project data in Excel, using search-and-replace, Excel functions, re-ordering or removing columns, and so on.
Then import the post-processed data to the target application (external database, CRM, reporting application, etc.) in the XLSX format. If the target application cannot import XLSX, but can import CSV, then save your data from Excel to a CSV file.
Finding inactive Jira projects
Use the standard Excel filter to show the rows where the days since the last issue update is greater than 90 days, for example.
Finding Jira projects with no issues or the most issues
Use the standard Excel filter to show the rows based on the number of issues in a project.
Finding archived Jira projects
Use the standard Excel filter to show rows with the "Archived" status only.
Finding recently archived Jira projects
Use the standard Excel filter to show the rows where the days since the archived date is less than 90 days, for example.
Automation for Jira project exports
Better Excel Exporter supports powerful automation for any type of Excel reports, also including these project exports. It is explained in the Excel automation tutorial.
You can utilize that mechanism, for instance, to send a project export to your mailbox periodically. Build a custom template that marks projects not updated for a year with red color, and create an automation rule to send that report to you each month! Simple, huh?
Upgrading from pre-5.1.0 app versions
Project exports work only with Better Excel Exporter 5.1.0 or newer.
If you are using an earlier version, you need to update your app version and create the missing templates. For that, please follow the upgrade guide.
Export Jira projects to Excel!
