A Faster Way to Export Jira Issues to Excel or CSV — Without Leaving the Page

[#1]

Exporting Jira issues to a spreadsheet is one of those things everyone does. A sprint report, a compliance pull, a stakeholder share, an offline analysis — at some point you need your filtered issues in a .xlsx or .csv file you can sort, pivot, and pass around.

Jira gives you two adjacent buttons for this in the Filters issue navigator's Apps dropdown: Open in Google Sheets and Open in Microsoft Excel. Both do the same thing in different flavors — they hand your filtered issues off to Google or Microsoft, and open a new browser tab to display the result.

I'm Simon from NGPILOT, and after one too many of those new-tab round-trips, we built a third option that stays in the page.

---

The native handoff, in practice

Here's what Open in Google Sheets looks like end-to-end:

And the Open in Microsoft Excel variant:

The pattern is the same in both. Click the action, a new browser tab opens, the third-party service takes over, your filtered Jira issues travel through Google's or Microsoft's infrastructure, and a spreadsheet eventually renders in that new tab. From there you can download it — usually — or just keep working in the cloud workbook you've now been given.

For a one-off analysis where you already live in Google Sheets or Excel Online, that handoff makes sense. For everything else — quick reports, recurring pulls, anything where you just want a file — it's slower and more exposed than it needs to be. New tab every time. Third-party OAuth state. Your Jira data leaving Atlassian before it lands back on your machine.

---

Our export stays in the page

Click Simple Bulk Issues Excel CSV Export for Jira in that same dropdown, and a modal opens right there in the issue navigator. No new tab, no handoff.

Pick the fields you want, pick a format, the file downloads with a timestamped name. Two clicks from the dropdown to a file on disk.

---

Field selection — the other thing the native paths don't give you

The native spreadsheet integrations export whatever fields Jira decides to send. You don't get a picker. If you want a different column set, you're configuring the issue navigator columns first, then re-running the export.

Our modal lists every navigable field in your Jira instance — system fields and custom fields — and lets you check exactly which ones to include. Three presets sit above the list:

• Select Default — 11 fields covering the common case: Work type, Key, Summary, Assignee, Reporter, Priority, Status, Resolution, Created, Updated, Due date
• Select All — every navigable field on your instance
• Clear All — start from empty and build your own set

Build the column set you actually want once. Re-run it every week. No column-shuffling in the navigator, no re-configuring before each export.

---

What about the data?

This is the part I personally care about most.

The app's manifest declares exactly one permission scope: read:jira-work. Read-only. Nothing in the manifest asks for write access to Jira, and nothing in the manifest asks to talk to any external service — no Google, no Microsoft, no NGPILOT backend, no analytics endpoint.

When you click Export, the app fetches your filtered issues from Jira (paginated, up to 1,000 per export), builds the spreadsheet file in your browser, and saves it to your downloads folder. At no point does the data leave Atlassian's infrastructure. The file is generated client-side and downloaded client-side.

Compared to the native handoff — where your issues travel through a third-party cloud before they reach you — that's a meaningfully different posture. For regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government, EU post-Schrems II), keeping issue data inside Atlassian tends to land a lot better in procurement and security review than handing it off on every export.

"It can't leak — there's nothing in the manifest that would let it" is an easier conversation than "trust us, it doesn't."

---

Formats, limits, and other practicalities

• Formats. CSV, XLS (legacy Excel), and XLSX (modern Excel). Pick whichever your downstream tool prefers.
• Field handling. User fields export as display names. Multi-value fields (labels, components, fix versions) export as comma-separated values. Date fields use locale formatting. Rich-text fields (descriptions, environments) convert from Atlassian Document Format to readable plain text. No garbled cells, no object Object.
• Volume. Up to 1,000 issues per export, fetched in pages of 100. Plenty for most status reports and stakeholder pulls.
• Filename. jira-issues-export-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.xlsx (or .xls, .csv). Timestamped and sortable, no filename collisions when you run it daily.

---

Where to try it

Simple Bulk Issues Excel CSV Export for Jira on the Marketplace. Free to try.

If your weekly Jira export currently involves a new tab and a third-party handoff just to land in a spreadsheet, this is the faster, quieter path.