Is there a way to update Jira Automation from an Excel sheet?

[atrout]

Hello! My team houses all our instructions for tasks within the description and summary features in jira. We currently have an excel sheet that shows all the information as our source of truth and when wording changes occur, we update the excel sheet, manually count how many tasks down it is then find that particular task and proceed to update it. It takes a lot of time and effort to do this especially because we make updates almost daily. Is there a way that Jira can pull from the excel sheet or import the data so that all we would have to do is make the changes to the excel sheet and it would update the jira automation rules?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @atrout , admittedly, I was really scratching my head here upon first reading this. However, I think I understand what you are doing now. Before I get to restating what I think your process is let me answer your question - no there is not a means of updating automation rules using some sort of Excel import.

it seems that you have 'templates' that define recurring parent/child issues, e.g. stories/tasks under epics. For some reason, likely historical, you are using excel to capture these templates. So now if you want to update your templates you are doing so first in excel, and then having to find the corresponding automation rule and update it there as well. Do I have this correct? Assuming so all I could offer is that you need to think about fully investing in Jira and push aside Excel. You could document these in Confluence which IMO would be better but you are still left. two places to update. 

I wish I had a better answer for you.

[MattD]

Agreed. Pick one tool and use that.

[atrout]

Thank you @Jack Brickey for the response! You have the idea correct, it's a bit of a mess so I get why you were confused lol. It would be nice to only work out of jira if there was a way to display what each task was so that it doesn't get lost in the mix. I would be open to using Confluence, but what would be the benefit? Especially if I would still have to update 2 places.

Thank you!

[Jack Brickey]

The benefits of Confluence is that it is a wiki based solution that is:

• easy to update
• integrated with Jira
• automatically keeps history
• Better solution than excel for this task given you can capture context (words)

now one question- what do you mean by "if there was a way to display what each task was so that it doesn't get lost in the mix"? 

[atrout]

Ah okay, thank you for the advice!

Just how I can't see which task is which from the automation view:

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

HI @atrout

some more food for thought: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there are a number of apps available that bring many of Excel's features right into Jira, meaning that you can ideally get the "best of both worlds" without having to sync back and forth.

As an example, my team and I work on an app that I think you might like, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a range of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting. This is how it looks in action:

All this happens right within Jira, updating the underlying Jira issues as you make changes to your sheet - there's no need for any syncronisation.

Again, whether this might make sense to you or not really depends on your exact use case - but before investing into crafting your own syncing solution, it might be worth a thought.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes