Spend enough time with software developers, and you’re bound to hear stories of weeks, if not months, spent living in a Jira project. The project management tool has become a staple in a developer’s daily routine.
From prioritizing tasks and tracking bugs to visualizing project status, Jira serves as a central hub for managing the entire software development lifecycle. Individual tasks in Jira are called issues or tickets and can be assigned to anyone.
Unfortunately, Jira’s complex user interface and feature bloat may result in a steep learning curve. This can alienate non-developers, who may wonder: Is there another way to access Jira tickets?
Yes, there is. ✅
You can export Jira data to Microsoft Excel, and you can export issues (tickets) to share with your entire team—at no added cost.
Here’s a simple, step-by-step guide on how to export Jira data to Excel, plus a few tips to speed up the process. 📝
When to Export Jira Tickets to Excel
Among bug-tracking software tools, Jira is extremely popular. However, its complicated user interface can hinder collaboration and transparency across cross-functional teams.
📌 For instance, customer support teams may struggle to track the status of feature updates in a JIRA instance, and CEOs might find it challenging to get a comprehensive overview of bug reports. Relying solely on Jira can be cumbersome and time-consuming.
Moreover, the cost of Jira licenses (~$7 per user) can add up, especially for teams that already use other project management tools.
In such scenarios, exporting tickets to Excel can be a better option.
For example, you might need to export Jira issues to Excel when:
- Sharing information with non-technical teams: Makes project status, bug reports, and other relevant information more accessible and easier to understand by exporting to an Excel spreadsheet
- Creating custom reports: Offers a wide range of customization options, allowing you to create custom reports like pivot tables. Plus, your data analysts are probably more familiar with Excel’s reporting capabilities than Jira!
- Analyzing data offline: Provides a portable and self-contained format for offline analysis or use in a different environment by exporting to Excel
- Streamlining audits: Enables efficient management of audit trails and ensures compliance with regulations and internal standards by exporting Jira issues to an Excel file
- Analyzing SLAs: Calculates and analyzes Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics, such as average response times, resolution times, and first-time fix rates, using Excel
Finally, you can export Jira issues to an Excel format as a safety net against data loss or corruption. By backing up your project data in a familiar and accessible format like Excel, you can mitigate the risks associated with data breaches or system failures.
How to Export Jira to Excel
The good news is that Jira has a manual export option that allows you to export your issues (tickets) as an Excel CSV file. Here’s how this works:
- Once you’ve logged into your Jira account, go to Filters and then All Issues. This will give you a list of all the issues (in other words, Jira tickets).
2. Go to Export and choose Export Excel CSV (all fields) to export data from all available fields or Export Excel CSV (my defaults) to export only the relevant fields to your team.
And you’re all set! This will initiate your export process, and your issues list will be saved as a CSV file that you can export to Excel. 💡
Optionally, you can create filters in Jira to export only a specific set of issues. Here’s how:
1. First, create a filter by choosing the default filter options available to you.
2. Click Save Filter with a title and description for your filter.
3. Finally, go to Export and choose Export Excel CSV (filter fields).
And you’re done! 🎉
💡Pro tip: As Jira’s manual export option is quite basic, consider using an exporter app from the Atlassian App Marketplace to export Jira Boards or customize how the issues are represented visually in Excel.
Common Jira Pain Points
We’ve seen how basic and restrictive Jira’s manual export options can be. Shortcomings include:
- Data can only be exported from Jira to Excel, preventing real-time updates and two-way synchronization
- No automatic data refresh options, causing Excel reports to become outdated quickly, making it difficult to maintain accurate and up-to-date information
- Raw data from your Jira export often requires extensive formatting, cleaning, and restructuring to be usable in Excel—a process that’s both labor-intensive and time-consuming
- Struggles to handle large volumes of data or complex reporting needs, leading to errors
But that’s not all. Some teams find Jira incompatible with software development methodologies like agile frameworks (and scrum).
This complaint is common throughout the Atlassian Community, from concerns about Jira’s emphasis on sprint dates over story points to the way the backlog can quickly become a chaotic jumble of user stories.
Many users have cited the platform’s clunky user interface and complex feature workflows as drawbacks.
Combined with the numerous active issues in its public issue tracker, some of which have been open for years, Jira has some serious limitations. While Jira can be a great issue-tracking software, it lags when mapping a project’s overall vision.
Meet ClickUp: The Perfect Alternative to the Jira and Excel Solution
If you’re frustrated with juggling multiple tools and seeking a unified solution for managing Jira and Excel data, an all-in-one work management platform like ClickUp might be just what you’re looking for. 👀
Let’s explore how ClickUp can serve as a great Jira alternative for software development teams, plus a comprehensive work management solution for your entire organization.
Give your team complete project visibility
Let’s start with the most significant benefit. ClickUp Projects offers your entire organization a clear view of your software development projects, such as the status of various features and bugs. This means your non-tech team can track bug statuses and feature progress independently without relying on your technical team for manual updates.
With ClickUp Projects, you can create a detailed project with tasks, subtasks, and even action items for each user story, assign tasks to specific people, and even set up automation rules to move tasks from one team member to another based on a task’s status.
For example, when a UI designer moves a task from design to backend code, you can automatically assign it to a developer on your team.
Another super-convenient feature is ClickUp Brain’s AI-powered universal search capabilities. Say your project managers want to know the status of a particular project or bug. They don’t have to dig through numerous tasks and issues. They can simply ask ClickUp Brain, which will provide the status and direct them to the relevant task for more information.
Streamline your bug-tracking process
Tracking bugs is only one part of the bug-tracking process. Equally important is a system that allows teammates to report bugs. And here’s where the ClickUp Form View comes into play.
Create a public form for customers and internal team members to report bugs. To gather comprehensive bug information, include form fields such as bug description, reporter details, and attachments.
Then, automatically add your form responses to your bug tracker to ensure they aren’t missed. Again, you can use automation to assign bugs to the QA lead, who can assign them to a developer based on their workload.
And if you’d prefer not to set up this process manually, you can check out one of ClickUp’s existing issue-tracking templates. Simply duplicate a template and get started tracking your bugs.
Ship code faster with agile workflows
Let’s quickly look at ClickUp’s software team-related capabilities—particularly its focus on agile frameworks and integrations with your DevOps tools.
To start with, you can set up (and automate) your sprint cycles with ClickUp Sprints. This includes:
- Setting sprint dates, assigning points, prioritizing tasks, and even automatically carrying over unfinished work to the next sprint
- Using a custom point system and aggregate points from subtasks, distribute them among team members, and effortlessly sort them to track sprint progress
- Creating burnup/burndown charts, cumulative flows, and other reports to visualize your sprint’s progress
- Syncing your team’s bug tracking and project management activities with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket in real-time
Another key software development challenge is accurate data integration between your various DevOps tools. With ClickUp, software teams can streamline the DevOps and CI/CD pipeline by connecting to over 200 software tools, including GitHub, Figma, Sentry, Slack, and others.
Connect technical documentation to tasks
In software development, technical documentation is as essential as keeping your project on track. Every time you build a new feature, you’ll create a bunch of stuff like user stories, system architecture diagrams, API documentation, testing reports, and release notes.
This can often combine your project management and document processing tools. For example, Jira users might have their documentation in Confluence. This can result in information silos, as you’re working with two different tools.
But that’s not the case with ClickUp, which can act as your entire tech stack rolled into one. ClickUp gives you a robust document management solution in the form of ClickUp Docs, which allows you to create documents, nested pages, and entire wikis from the same platform you use to manage your projects.
Moreover, ClickUp Docs has various collaboration features like tags, real-time editing, and more that can help your team work better together.
Even better, you can embed your projects into ClickUp Docs—and manage everything from a single document.
💡Pro tip: Organize project information by creating Custom Fields within your projects and adding links to your technical documentation for quick and easy access.
Switch from Jira to ClickUp and Manage your Projects Better
If you’re looking for a unified work management tool, ClickUp is definitely what you need. It offers a comprehensive solution that includes project tracking, document management, agile workflows, and so much more. Plus, it comes with a host of features and integrations specific to product and engineering teams, enabling organized and collaborative software development. 🤝
For those transitioning from Jira, ClickUp offers a convenient Jira Import Service that migrates all your projects, boards, and issues from Jira Service and Jira Cloud within minutes.
From establishing a project hierarchy that converts Jira Epics into Tasks and Stories into subtasks to mapping Custom Fields and statuses, the Jira Import feature will guide you through every step, ensuring a seamless transition to ClickUp and minimal downtime.
Curious to learn more? Sign up to ClickUp for free and see for yourself how it can help cross-functional teams manage projects more effectively—while fostering both transparency and collaboration. ✨