Tools Button in Issues not working

[Maximilian Krause]

First off: Complete newbie to Jira here so bear with me if I'm getting some technical terms wrong!

I've created a project in Jira along with a board. I then also added some issues to the board, however accidentally added them all as tasks, whereas some were supposed to be epics. I'm able to change them from task to epic on a single basis by clicking on the issue and selecting the "Move" option from the tool button for that issue. However, that obviously takes quite a while.

I've read about the bulk editor (which the single "Move" option seems to use, too - just for a single issue...) and wanted to try that. So, I go into the "Issues" section of the board and try to press the tools/actions button on the very top right to get to the bulk editor. However, nothing happens. On the first click, a context menu very briefly pops up and immediately closes again. On subsequent clicks, nothing happens at all. I've tried from three different browsers (two Chromium browsers + Firefox), no chance.

Is there some configuration I'm missing to be able to access it? The project is team-managed and I'm the site admin.

A small GIF to underline what the issue is:

[Diogo Teles · Accepted solution]

Hi @Maximilian Krause, welcome to the community!

There may be a legitimate issue there, but also take a look at this article to make sure you covered all the prerequisites to be able to bulk change issues: Editing multiple issues at the same time.

You can also try a slightly different route. It looks like you are clicking the tools button directly on a Jira work management project board. Instead, try clicking on the search box on the top right of Jira, then select the "Advanced Search" option at the bottom.

There, make a basic query using the query dropdown menus that shows the issues you want and then click on the tools button (... button) on the top right of the screen. That should also give you the bulk change option.

Both options do the same, but you may get different results since they come from other GUI elements.

[Maximilian Krause]

Thanks for the quick reply!

After having a second read through the documentation you've linked, I've tried to temporarily grant the global "Make bulk changes" permission to the group "Public". After doing so the tools menu indeed pops up and I can make bulk changes.

Obviously, keeping it public isn't the solution here and I'm pretty sure I'm misunderstanding something regarding Jira/Atlassian groups & permissions. I'm both in the "site-admins" and the "jira-admins-[org]" groups. However, this doesn't seem enough to make bulk changes by default. The only group I can grant permission for making bulk changes is the "Public" group, though. No other groups are available to select:

Are those groups different from the ones mentioned above? I even tried creating a new group in the administrator settings, but that doesn't show up there either.

Edit: Got it. I needed to explicitly write "site-admins" into the "Group" dropdown in order for the group to show up. Granting the global permission to the group finally led to me being able to make bulk changes. Thanks again for the heads-up!