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  • Exporting Structure to XLS (Excel)

This documentation relates to an older version 2.2 of the Structure Plugin for JIRA. View the current documentation home.

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You can download the structure that you see on the screen as an XLS file and open it in Microsoft Excel or in other applications that support this format.

Click the Excel () button in the toolbar and the browser should download a new XLS file, which you can save or open. The XLS file will contain all issues that are displayed currently by the structure widget.

The XLS file has the same columns as the structure widget. Like with the printable page, the Summary column displays only the Summary field, without issue description, but indented to show how sub-issues are nested. If you'd like to export issue description, add a separate Description column to the structure widget.

Compatibility

The exported file is compatible with Microsoft Excel 2003, 2008 and 2010.

Mac OS X Users: On a Mac, Excel button is not present on the toolbar by default. To show the button, use X, X keyboard shortcut (press X twice).

Note that XLS format allows up to 65536 rows in the spreadsheet, so a larger structure wouldn't fit - use filtering or Fixed Structure View.

Likewise, if you have issues that are more than 15 levels deep in the hierarchy (meaning that they have 15 "parents" and "grand-parents"), they will be all shown with level 15 indentation in Excel, due to a technical limit.

Row Groups

The rows are grouped together using Excel grouping feature to form structure in the spreadsheet – you can expand and collapse sub-issues under a certain parent issue.

The maximum depth of grouping in XLS file is 8, so if you have a deeper structure, it still will be exported but the grouping will work only for the top 8 levels.

Not all spreadsheet applications that support XLS format also support row grouping feature. At the time of writing, Open Office does support it, but Google Docs don't.

Columns

The columns are formatted in the best way suitable for a spreadsheet.

Column Type

Notes

Issue Key

The cell with an issue key is a link to the actual issue.

Summary

Cells in the Summary column have indentation just like on the Structure Widget. Note that if you change the format of a cell there, you might lose the indentation level.

Progress

Progress field contains a fractional number from 0 to 1, formatted as a percent value.

Description, Environment and large text fields

The text might not fit in the column. You can increase column size or use Format Cells | Alignment | Wrap Text option in Excel to have a large text take more than one line, increasing the row height. Note that a cell might not accommodate a very large text and you might see only the first part of it.

Dates

Date values are displayed in your local date format.

Estimates, Time Worked

The duration fields contain actual numbers (fractional number of days), which you can sum or otherwise process. The display format is HH:MM, where HH is the number of hours and MM is the number of minutes. So an estimation of 5 days will be displayed as 40:00 (if you have 8-hour days).

Standard custom fields

Standard custom fields are rendered according to their type.

Plugin-provided custom fields

Custom fields from other plugins are displayed as they are rendered.

Note for Plugin Developers

If your plugin provides a new custom field type, please ensure that the field is displayed with the best compatibility with the other plugins, including Structure. In your column view velocity template, check for $displayParams.textOnly and/or $displayParams.excel_view and/or $displayParams.nolink – all those parameters will be set to true by Structure and may also be used by other plugins. See CommonVelocityKeys.java and JIRA sources for examples.

Printing

The XLS file is set up for a standard printing configuration:

  • Page orientation is Landscape.
  • The content is fit horizontally on the page (you might need to change that if you have too many columns or large content).
  • Paper size is set to Letter if your account locale is US or Canada, otherwise it is set to A4.

Make sure you see Print Preview before sending the document for printing. If you don't like how it looks, consider using Printable page.