Issue with Jira Cloud for Google Sheets – Duplicate Worklog Entries

Question

Greetings, community,
I wanted to ask a question about the Jira Cloud for Google Sheets extension.

We're using it to extract worklog hours from tickets, but we've noticed some unexpected behavior:
In some cases, the logged hours appear duplicated in the Sheet, even though there's only a single entry in Jira. It seems to happen randomly.

The duplicated entries are identical across all fields, which we believe is not the expected behavior.

Has anyone experienced something similar?
Could this be caused by a specific setting or configuration?

Thanks in advance!

Greyce Amorim · Answer

This was happening on my end, but I got ChatGPT's help figuring out why. It seems Jira stores sprint information internally per ticket, and the columns below may change

Sprint.startDateSprint.completeDateSprint.endDateSprint.goal

A Jira ticket can belong to multiple sprints during its lifetime

This is the key point.

A ticket might:

* start in Sprint 30,

* move to Sprint 31,

* get carried over into Sprint 32,

* and finally be completed in Sprint 33.

1- Jira keeps every single sprint the ticket has ever touched.

It never deletes previous sprint entries.

So internally, the ticket now contains something like:
Sprint 30 record
Sprint 31 record
Sprint 32 record
Sprint 33 record (final)

Each sprint has its own:

* startDate

* completeDate

* endDate

* goal

* name

* state

This means the sprint-related fields are not single values.
They are lists / arrays of sprint objects

2️⃣ Jira’s Google Sheets add-on cannot handle arrays properly

When the add-on exports a ticket, it doesn’t know how to keep sprint lists in a single cell.

So it does the simplest thing possible:

It “explodes” the sprint array into one row per sprint.

Which gives you:

* Same ticket key

* Same summary

* Same assignee

* Same story points

* BUT different sprint fields

This is why every row looks almost identical except:

* Sprint.startDate is different

* Sprint.completeDate is different

* Sprint.endDate is different

* Sprint.goal is different

* Sprint.name is different

* Sprint.state is different

The Google Sheets export is simply expanding sprint history into separate rows, and Google Sheets interprets them as separate “records”.

They are not duplicates they are different sprint snapshots for the same ticket.

Frederik Vindum · Answer

Greetings,

We have experienced the exact same. Duplicate entries are found when using the Jira extension in Sheets and in Excel. Unsuccessfully, I tried reprodusing. At first I thought it was related to editing time registrations on the issue but I looked into that I found duplicates in other non edited time registrations. Multiple tests with export from within Jira to CSV/xlxs and cross checking time registrations leaves me with the though that it might be the extension that has the issue.