How to create Excel-Style Pivot Reports Directly in Jira and Confluence

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If your team lives in Jira—and it probably does—and you need detailed stats or more complex reports, you’ve likely exported Jira data to Excel just to build a pivot table and get the insights you need.

Not because you love spreadsheets, but because you—and probably your leadership team—needed answers that Jira couldn’t easily provide.

Jira is great for tracking work. But when it comes to flexible reporting—custom calculations, aggregations, percentages, multi-field statistics, pivot-style views, work items breakdown or advanced charts—things start to get harder than they should be. Native gadgets only go so far, so spreadsheets often become the default workaround.

The problem is that exporting data to Excel every time you need a report quickly becomes repetitive, time-consuming, and frustrating. 

There’s a better way.

You can build Excel-like pivot tables and charts directly inside Jira—no exports, no spreadsheets—and keep everything live and up to date.

How? With the Great Gadgets app for Jira and Confluence.

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Excel-Style Pivot Reporting Directly In Jira & Confluence

Because we know you might be tired of exporting Jira issues to Excel, we created the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget (part of the Great Gadgets app) so you can enjoy spreadsheet-level flexibility directly in your Jira dashboards — or even in your Confluence pages, just like in Excel.

With this powerful gadget, you can:

• ✅ Build pivot tables, heatmaps and pivot charts using Jira filters or custom JQL

• ✅ Group data by multiple Jira fields, including fields that Jira gadgets do not support

• ✅ Apply counts, sums, percentages, and other calculations

• ✅ Instantly turn tables into visual charts

• ✅ Keep everything live and updated in real time

No exports. No copy-paste. No rework. Just easy, effortless reporting.

Let’s explore some common scenarios for using this powerful gadget in Jira.

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Use Case 1: Manager Viewing Team Workload by Project, Status Category, and Work Item Type

Get a clear view of your teams’ workload—broken down by status category and work item type—without juggling Excel spreadsheets.

With the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget:

• Add it to your Jira dashboard.

• Connect it to your projects using a filter or JQL query.

• Select than drag and drop Project, Status Category, and Issue Type fields into rows and columns.

Instantly see a pivot table displaying workload distribution across teams, understanding where attention is needed most.

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Use Case 2: Scrum Master Tracking Sprint Delivery by Team Member and Sum of Story Points

See exactly how your sprint is progressing—by assignee and story points—without exporting to Excel or juggling spreadsheets.

With the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget:

• Add it to your Jira dashboard.

• Connect it to your sprint items using a filter or JQL.

• Select than drag and drop Assignee, Status, and Story Points fields into rows and columns.

• Configure the calculation as Sum of Story Points.

Instantly view a pivot table heatmap showing how much work each team member has completed and what’s still in progress.

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Use Case 3: Product Owner Tracking Progress of Epics

Keep a finger on the pulse of all the epics—across teams, or projects—without digging through countless Jira filters.

With the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget:

• Add it to your Jira dashboard.

• Connect it to a filter or JQL query that pulls work items from all relevant epics.

• Select than drag and drop Parent Epic and Status Category fields into rows and columns.

• Configure the metric as Sum as Fraction of Rows by Story Points.

• Configure it as a table, or change the view to a chart (for example, a stacked bar chart)

Instantly view a stacked bar chart with the overall epics completion at a glance.

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Use Case 4: Executive Manager Visualizing The Status of Cross-Team Initiatives

Get clear visibility into cross-team initiatives and their progress—directly from Jira.

With the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget:

• Add it to your Jira dashboard.

• Connect it to a filter or JQL query that pulls work items (stories, tasks) under the initiatives you want to track.

• Select than drag and drop Parent of Epic, Team and Status Category fields into rows and columns.

• Configure the metric as Count.

After clicking Save, you’ll instantly get a pivot table showing each initiative and the number of related work items by status and team.

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Why Pivot Tables Changes The Way Teams Report

This isn’t about prettier tables. When pivot tables live inside Jira, a few important things happen:

• Reports stay connected to live data

• Teams spend less time preparing reports

• Dashboards answer real questions, not just show numbers

• Decisions are based on current information, not last week’s export

Great Gadgets removes the repetitive, manual work of exporting and analyzing Jira data — and gives teams back hours every month. And, more importantly, you have all the information you need in one place, right where your work already is.

👉 If you’d like to test it out, Great Gadgets is free for 30 days on the Atlassian Marketplace.

And if you have any questions or need help with the setup, feel free to contact support@stonikbyte.com at any time.