How to Export Jira User Activity to Excel for Reporting

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It’s Friday afternoon.

Within 15 minutes, your sprint review begins.

A stakeholder looks at the board and wonders: Why has this work item remained in progress for so long?

You open Jira. The work item is there. Status is okay. However, the history of the work, who edited what, when, and why, lies deep in tabs and comments.

You scroll.

You click History.

You try to piece together the timeline.

Multiply this by 30 work items, 8 team members, and one executive summary due today.

It is the everyday life of Team Leads and Project Managers. Jira records all the details, but it is challenging to transform that activity into a reportable story of teamwork.

That is why the ability to track and export Jira user activity quickly becomes a real superpower.

Why Project Managers Need Jira User Activity Exports

Project Managers don’t simply monitor work item statuses; they must also be informed and prepared to report on progress and bottlenecks as they arise.

A board view isn’t enough when stakeholders want to know why something changed, when it changed, or who made the decision.

That is why the export Jira user activity export allows:

• Use facts, not assumptions, to explain changes. See who exactly made the changes, updated estimates, or reopened work items, and when they did that.
• Create detailed reports. Exporting real activity data to Excel or CSV enables sprint reviews and stakeholder updates.
• Minimize time in search of responses. No more asking the team, “Do you remember why this was reopened?”
• See where work goes back and forth. When work items are reopened or go back and forth between statuses, something is slowing the team. User activity exports enable you to identify these trends early and understand what went wrong.

To Project Managers, visibility means confidence. And confidence comes from having the correct data available to share when questions arise.

What Jira Shows (and What It Doesn’t) About Team Activity

Jira keeps track of what happens to a work item. You can open it, select the History tab, and view the list of changes. This is effective when you need to check a single work item at a time. However, reporting doesn’t often work that way.

Where Jira begins to fail:

• History tab is per work item only. You have to open many work items and review the history of each one individually to understand what happened during a sprint.

• JQL helps you find work items, but it doesn’t let you easily filter specific actions like reopenings, estimate changes, or status transitions by specific user.
• No team-level activity view. Jira doesn’t provide a clear view of what each team member changed in a sprint.
• Exports are limited. There is an option of exporting work item lists, but not their entire change history, in a clean Excel or CSV format.
• Deleted work items leave gaps. The history of a work item is lost when it is deleted. This complicates explaining scope changes in the future.

For Project Managers and Team Leads, this means you see the final state of the work item, but not the full story behind it.

How to Export Jira User Activity for Reporting

Issue History for Jira app by SaaSJet is designed to support teams that need more than the History tab in Jira. It makes work item changes easy to view and export.

Project Managers can, instead of manually reviewing each work item, view all changes made within a sprint or by a specific user in one place.

See User Activity in One View

With Issue History for Jira, you are able to:

• See changes on several work items simultaneously.
• Filter by user, time range, sprint, project.
• Easily view status changes, reopenings, and all field updates.

This makes it much easier to answer questions like: “What did the specific team member actually change during this sprint or specific date range?”.

Export Jira User Activity for Reports

Issue History for Jira app by SaaSJet enables you to:

• Export user activity to Excel.
• Provide reports to stakeholders or leadership.

No screenshots. No manual timelines. Just clean data.

Don’t Lose the Story of Deleted Work Items

When a work item is deleted in Jira, it disappears. Once they are gone, it becomes impossible to see what was changed or why.

Issue History for Jira app tracks and restores the deleted work items.

For Project Managers, this means:

• No missing data in the reports.
• Clear reasons for scope changes.
• Easier retrospectives after the sprint.

Example: Using Jira User Activity Export in Excel

Let’s look at a real-life example.

Assignee: Emily Johnson

Updater: Emily Johnson

Period: Last Week (12/15/2025-12/21/2025)

As a Project Manager, you want to understand how Emily’s work has evolved over the past week. Not just which tasks she closed, but what she changed and how often.

Using Issue History for Jira, you export Emily’s user activity for the last week to Excel.

Let’s see in detail what activity you can actually analyze:

• Review logged time

In Excel, you can:

• Filter rows where the time spent field changed.
• Sum the values to see how much time was logged.
• Compare planned vs actual effort.

This helps you answer: How much work was recorded for the week?

• See reopened tasks

To understand rework:

• Filter the status column.
• Look for changes like Done→ Reopened.

In Excel, you can:

• Count how many tasks were reopened.
• Identify which work items moved backward.
• Spot patterns that may point to unclear requirements.

This is especially useful during retrospectives.

• Track priority changes

You can also:

• Filter changes to priority.
• Add comments in Excel to explain why changes happened.

This makes stakeholder reporting much easier.

So, in just a few minutes, you have a clear weekly activity report for Emily based on real Jira data.

Summing Up

Jira shows the present state of work items, yet it doesn’t always tell how the team has gotten there. To Project Managers and Team Leads, such a lack of context complicates the reporting process.

By exporting Jira user activity, you can:

• Know what was done in a sprint.
• See rework and reopened tasks.
• Feel confident when preparing reports to stakeholders.

This is easy when you are using Issue History for Jira app by SaaSJet. It gathers changes at a single location and allows easy filtering and exporting to Excel to produce clear, useful reports.

Having the correct historical data on the user activity, you don’t have to waste time finding the answers, and you have more time to lead your team.

Track Jira user activity, understand team changes, and export clear Excel reports with Issue History for Jira by SaaSJet.

Try it on Atlassian Marketplace

[Yana Misiura_BrizoIT]

that's definitely helpful! thanks!