JIRA 7.2.x Excel export gone?

[Michael Kolb]

With my old JIRA Version there was an option to export an issue list to an excel file. I've updated to JIRA 7.2.x - the option is not available anymore (only export to Word is left). Unfortunately CSV is not an option, as Excel is unable to correctly import fields that contain the text-delimiter.

How to re-enable Excel export?

[Marc_Teufel_hama_de · Accepted solution]

You can activate Excel in your jira-config.properties with following line:

jira.export.excel.enabled=true

(This works vor JIRA Core 7.2.2 and 7.2.3)

Alternatively you can set your Region to US and configure the list separator to comma. Then Excel export/import in Excel will work again.

Alternative 2: Save the csv file and add "sep=," as the first line in the file. When opening the file in excel the comma will be used as a delimiter

[Kai Gottschalk [Berenberg]]

Hi Marc,

many thanks for this workaround. I tried it with JIRA 7.2.2 in JIRA SW including a restart unfortunately without any success. Are there any other known pitfalls/things to consider (deletion of caches, etc.), which might help to get this running again.

Cheers
Kai

PS: Another restart helped the export-functionality do re-appear. Thanks for this hint!

[B_ Normann P_ Nielsen]

Works fine in JIRA Software v7.2.3

[Borut Hadžialić]

Works in JIRA 7.2.2 SW for me.

[Mark de Bont]

Works in JIRA 7.2.6. SW

(also described in https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-excel-export-of-issues-no-longer-opens-correctly-838403242.html )

[Leonardo Bertolo]

Hi,
would you kindly tell me the path of the properties file?

Inside my JIRA installation there is no jira-config.properties file. I'm using JIRA Software version 7.2.6.

I found $JIRA_HOME/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/jira-features.properties which had the option jira.export.csv.enabled=true, so I placed inside that file the option you suggested, but while watching catalina.out during startup I found this:

jira.export.excel.enabled : false

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It is mentioned in the docs, but well buried.  If you don't have a jira-config.properties file, just create one (simple plain text).  You don't need to put anything else in it, it is just "add the lines you need".

[Leonardo Bertolo]

@Nic Brough [Adaptavist] thanks! I got it.... I was looking in my JIRA Instalation directory.

I've created the file in my JIRA Home Directory and I got it working properly.

I confirm, it's working in JIRA Software 7.2.6

[Adam Downer]

is changing the 'jira.export.excel.enabled' property supported? i.e. if the functionality is being removed then will strange behaviour start to occur if we switch it back on?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, it's not officially supported, because they've turned it off by default.

Turning it on will do no harm though - worst case is that enables a broken version of the exports, but that won't do anything worse than not work well and produce rubbish downloads.  If they remove the code, then the property will simply be ignored.

[Deepali Bagul]

Hi @Nic Brough [Adaptavist]

Inside my JIRA home directory  $JIRA_HOME/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/ their was no jira-config.properties file. As per the docs i created jira-config.properties file and added the line jira.export.excel.enabled=true and restart the JIRA server. but this doesn't work for me on our JIRA 7.2.3

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You're looking in the wrong place.  Nowhere does anyone mention that directory, and it doesn't exist anyway, I've no idea what you're trying to do with that.

[Scott McDonald]

I'm noticing in the CSV export, if an issue has more than one component, label, etc, it creates a new column rather than prior to 7.2 and using the Excel export, it would concatenate the values in one column.  Is there a setting where I can turn off the "create column for each value"?

[Jeremy Coukoulis]

Thank you Marc.Teufel! I was scrambling when I noticed this option was missing after our recent upgrade, I knew my users would be coming after me with pitchforks!

BTW, this fix works on JIRA core/software version 7.3.2 as well.

[Steve Cagle]

Thanks so much.  Works great.  Jira Server 7.3.5.

[Bhartesh]

Guys, i am facing issue in Jira software 7.3.5

As mentioned in the comments i have created a file "jira-config.properties " in location "$JIRA_HOME/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/" then added the line "jira.export.excel.enabled=true" in the fiile and restarted the server but still its not working.

In the jira screen in Export section i am not finding any option called excel.

Please can anyone help me on this.

Thank you in advance.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Excel export is done from the issue navigator.  Search for some issues, then look for the links

[Bhartesh]

@nic brough , I am tring to expoet from issue navigator only.

I have issue filter which i am trying to export but i am getting to export it in csv, printable, xml, RSS and word.

But i am not finding the export in excel format, which we had in the previous version jira.

Thank you in anticipation

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sorry, I didn't notice the directory you've used.

Could you try re-reading the comments above instead of randomly guessing where the file goes?

[Bhartesh]

@Nic,

The issue was with the file format.

I had saved the file in different format instead of .properties.

This is working now. :-) Thank you..

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

By "format", you mean "location"

[siddhesh]

Hi,

 Will this work for JIRA 7.4.6 version?

Regards,

Siddheshwar

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

All the way up to 8.2.  I believe that may be the last version to have it.

[Christian Bär]

Still available in Version 8.5.7 . 
If you are behind. Just try.

[Jose M.]

We have, we need and we use it with Jira 8.5.5 (LTS release). I hope, it will still be supported, as Excel is widely used.

[Valentijn Scholten]

Another way in which functionality is reduced with the CSV export is that it no longer exports a direct link (URL) to the issue in JIRA. The prevouis Excel export had this, very conventient for people receiving an Excel sheet and wanting to look at the issue details.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

If CSV does not work for you (or you're looking for something more powerful), the Better Excel Plugin can export actual XLSX files for you.

[Ben Middleton]

Thanks - this looks interesting. However, we were using the previous bundled functionality successfully. Atlassian should not be removing functionality which requires customers to have to invest in 3rd party solutions.

[Tayyab Bashir]

This is a nice plugin.
Are there any other plugins that provide the export functionality for Excel but a little expensive? 
 

[Dan]

You might be interested in the Exporter Issue Comments for CSV and Excel - cheaper but still has the now gone Export to Excel functionality.

[Michael Kornatzki]

Great, i payed for jira and with every version i need more 3rd party plugins :(

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Mmm, I think Atlassian's explanation here might be "if you do it the Jira way, you don't need to export"

[Michael Kornatzki]

It's interesting how Atlassian might be to know how we have to use it.

We need the Excel in the communication with our customers.
They want to get alle the changes in a version in an Excel-Sheet.

[Deepali Bagul]

Thanks @Nic Brough [Adaptavist],

I was looking at wrong place. I added the jira-config.properties to the root of your JIRA home directory (var/atlassian/application-data/jira/) and added the line jira.export.excel.enabled=true and restart the JIRA server.

I got it working correctly for JIRA 7.2.3 , Thanks !

[QDappnet]

Same here, thanks for the home directory path info.

I created jira-config.properties file (with a text line jira.export.excel.enabled=true), but saved to wrong location /opt/atlassian/jira/ 

After correct saving the properties file to /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/, I restarted JIRA, there are 2 new options added to Export: Excel (All fields) and Excel (Current fields)

I have JIRA v7.4.3

JIRA application home directory
https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/jira-application-home-directory-861253888.html

[Teja]

Thanks guys, It worked.

[SIGERI]

Si funciona,

Yo estoy in Linux y seguí las instrucciones de  Quy Duong,

Saludos,

Ananías

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not a case of enabling it, it has gone.

Excel should have no problem reading CSV though.  Is there a setting in Excel that's breaking it?

[Michael Kolb]

The problem is simple to reproduce: Create an issue with the description 'this is a text containing a "text-delimiter"', and export it (including the field "description") to CSV. The CSV will contain '"this is a text containing a ""text-delimiter"""', which destroys the whole column layout in excel, as the escaped text-delimiter is not recognised.

[Denis Boisvert]

It should work. You might have the following issue that I had myself not too long ago:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2668678/importing-csv-with-line-breaks-in-excel-2007

[Ben Middleton]

There are other issues with the new CSV export. For example, if your field includes commas, you can no longer export sensibly. There's a bug for this:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-62517

[AMIT GULATI]

We are recently migrated to JIRA 7.2 and faced the same challenge. Here are two ways in which we have been able to workaround:

1. Using Pivot Table and Pivot Chart gadgets in confluence, we are able to create pivot charts on realtime data. 

2. Instead of using export to csv, I have used export to printable, copy all and paste in excel. Although this approach requires little cleanup but it ensures that required fields are in the right format in excel.

In my view, export to excel must be avoided as much as possible because that leads us away from using live dashboards and set wrong expectations with stakeholders.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I agree - I don't like export to a spreadsheet because it implies the user is going to try to do "clever" reporting. 

I was on a project at a major financial company many years ago where there were a lot of spreadsheets floating around.  We were increasingly having problems where people would use the reports in a system and get a true representation of what was in there, and then seeing people export to a spreadsheet, do "clever" reporting, and start arguments in meetings because their report didn't tell the same story as the one in the system.

We did a project that took a selection of spreadsheets and went into detail about how accurate they were.  The numbers that stick in my mind were that the reports coming out of 30% of them were, quite simply, wrong.  But that was only for simple exports by a single user.  When they were shared and edited by 2 people, the failure rate jumped to over 80% and 3 or more people gave us a 98%.

To be fair, these were not simple spreadsheets where someone has got a couple of hundred lines and generated a simple graph.  All of them had at least one calculation or formula, and at least a thousand lines.

But, I stand by it.  Extracts are mostly useless.  A data extract, manipulation and report should always be questioned as to its accuracy.  And its timing, as a lot of people fail to grasp that exports are point-in-time, and obsolete seconds after being done.

[Rafal Sojka]

We don't have impact on people who tweak their data but the functionality of application should not be limited due to such reason. Excel is and will be a standard tool in many businesses and unfortunately not all people are so technically savvy they know what CSV is and know how to deal with it. Finally, we had to enable the export to Excel by setting the jira.export.excel.enabled variable to true.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Excel and other spreadsheets should be banned, not seen as a "standard tool".  As I described earlier, most spreadsheets are simply wrong when they're used for reporting.

[Rafal Sojka]

It is really bold statement that "Excel and other spreadsheets should be banned", those tools were standard when JIRA has not even existed. :) 

Regards,

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Spreadsheets - helping people misrepresent their data and giving them inaccurate reports since 1976

There is not one place I've seen use a shared spreadsheet well.  One big place (financial) did an analysis of over 1,000 random spreadsheets and found that when a sheet had two people using it, there was an 80% chance of it being wrong.  That jumped to 95% when three people were using it, and 100% when there were more than 3.

Just because something is old or well used, does not mean it is any good.

[Rafal Sojka]

I do not think that JIRA in any way can prevent people from misrepresentation of their data. If someone does not know how to do his/her tasks, none of the tools is going to help here. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You're right if you are talking about people putting incorrect data in, but that's not what I meant by "misrepresentation".  I was meaning that even given the correct data, people manipulate it to give calculations, diagrams and reports that are simply wrong.

Jira (and any other application designed for handling the raw data) will generally not allow people to do that.  They give outputs that do represent the information correctly

[Jose M.]

Hi Nic. Sorry to be honest, but if you could be a bit more friendly, that would increase my appreciation for the tools from Adaptavist. eg: I am not allways satisfied with ScriptRunner, but nothing is perfect :)

[Solomon Vansteenburg]

I hate to rise the dead on this thread, but I seem to be in a pickle. I HAD this issue, solved it due to this thread, and now have the same issue again even though the fix is still in place. I upgraded to 7.3.7 back in June of last year and haven't applied any updates since. We were able to export to Excel for a good long while, but suddenly in the past month or so I've been getting reports from the users that they can't do it anymore. Why?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It can't just change like that.  You (as in your organisation, not just you) have removed  or changed the flag from the properties file and restarted Jira

[Solomon Vansteenburg]

I'm (supposed to be) the only one who has access, let alone knows anything about me doing it. The setting is still there in the properties file, and the file hasn't been modified since 8/10/2017 when I made the original change. There are a few people who have heightened privileges inside of JIRA. Could it have been meddled with inside of JIRA?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It might be possible to kill it with a property in global configuration -> advanced, or with javascript hacks.  Is the properties file still fully read/write by the jira user? 

I can't think of other ways to remove it. 

[Solomon Vansteenburg]

Still fully read/writable. I'm not seeing anything in the advanced settings that pertains to the jira-config.properties file, but there are a few people who have high enough privilege to modify in that space. I will have to look more into that.

[Marc Demhartner]

We´re using Jira 7.6.0 - with Excel 2016 i am getting an error when trying to open the exported excel file. Excel basiclly says, that the file format is not correct. I can open it after i press Yes, but it looks "broken" - Any1 else has this problem? 

[Michael Kornatzki]

As far as i know jira never exports an excel-file.

It was only a menu item named "Excel" but it was a html-file with an extension xls.

Therefore now the menu export-HTML is better.

If you look into the "xls" file with an editor you will see html (also in old files).

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Michael is correct (Y)

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Yes.

Jira exports HTML files with the .xls file extension and Excel finds them suspicious. It has always been working like this.

Please read this question from the top, there are multiple things you can do.

[Rafal Sojka]

Thank you for update. However, business users who work with JIRA daily do not understand the different between HTML and CSV format and are familiar only with Excel. For them, this change, no matter how it was implemented underneath, is problematic.

[Anu Alppiranta]

Special characters won't get exported as expected.
UTF-8 encoding worked well with Excel export, but not with Export CSV.

[Michael Kornatzki]

For german umlauts UTF-8 in csv works as expected.

[Gairat Rakhimbaev]

configuration file workaround works in 7.5.0

thanks much!

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Still working in JIRA 7.3

1. Stop JIRA.
2. Locate the jira-config.properties file in the $JIRA_HOME directory. If the file does not exist, please proceed to create it.
3. Open the file and add the below on a separate line:

jira.export.excel.enabled=true

4. Save this file.
5. Restart JIRA.

[Sean Kronberg]

works in 7.5.0, as well.

[jobinjames]

works. Thanks

[Mark Biro]

Hi there,

With ImpEx you can import and export your issues to XLSX or HTML (even with comments, images and attachments)!

Feel free to give it a try: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.moresimp.impex/server/overview 

Best regards, Mark