Basic functions of JIRA missing

Question

Hi,

So, i'm relatively new to JIRA, having come from a background of using TFS.  There are some fairly fundamental functions which I can't find in the out-of-the-box solution but I'm wondering whether I'm missing something.  The first is an easy way to export queries from JIRA to Excel and visa versa, Excel has much more powerful query functions than anything offered within JIRA.  The articles I've found discuss using a power query approach but this doesn't seem to work for me as I'm getting a 400 error whenever I try this.

The second thing I'm looking for is a really simple gadget that will simply count the number of items returned in a given query and return it to my dashboard.  This doesn't seem to me like rocket science.  Example image below of TFS panels:

Jimmy Van (GLiNTECH) · Answer

Use the Favorite Filters gadget for a simple count.

JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_ · Answer

Well,

Atlassian is not Microsoft, so why should one buy an integration which is not needed by most customers (Export/Import to Excel). You can get that with several apps visiting the marketplace.

I'm pretty sure that the functions you need can be found using:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=server&product=jira&query=excel

Just a question: If TFS with Excel is so good & fits your needs, why are you changing?

Timothy Wintle · Answer

Hi JP, thanks for the reply.  The charts and graphs and widgetty things look lovely but on my dashboard, all I really want is very succinct numbers that immediately mean something to me, a simple "count" function in a gadget doesn't seem like something that would be hard for a developer at Atlassian to create even if it doesn't already exist.  If this were SQL it would be a simple GROUP BY and COUNT(*)., sometimes less is more.

I would think that getting the start date and end date of the current sprint for example would have been a very basic function but can' t see any way to do this despite multiple googles.

When I talk about Excel integration, I'm talking about something similar to what Microsoft offers with their Team Foundation Server, in that you can literally Export data from TFS directly to Excel and conversely publish changes and new items from Excel directly to TFS.  The fact that its built into their out of the box software configuration really does make their product very nice to use.

Any more light you can shed on this will be most welcome :-)

Thanks

Tim