Do you use spreadsheets along with Jira?

[Stiltsoft support]

Hi guys!

As we use Confluence way more often than Jira, we wanted to ask about some tips and tricks while working with projects/tickets.

Is "pure Jira" enough? Or do you somehow combine it with Excel or spreadsheets in general? We mean for calculations, for aggregation and visualization, for export and further emails, etc.

Maybe you use some apps or have found a custom workaround that makes your routine everyday tasks easier. Or maybe you still have "pains" and we'll be able to find a solution together. 

Please share with us!

[Amit Bansal]

During sprint planning, since we use efforts against subtasks and due dates against subtasks, it is hard to identify how much of available capacity is planned of an individual hence we use excel in parallel during sprint planning. Outside this use case, we don't use excels for any other project management areas.

[Stiltsoft support]

So, you just switch from Jira to Excel, as we see it. Thank you for sharing!

[Jim D]

We use Excel for Feature prioritization.  The Feature data is exported from Jira as Excel CSV, cleaned up, and pasted into a sheet in Excel.  We give a score to each of 5 questions, and then calculate a priority value (0 to 100) based on the weight and response for each answer.

Once relative priority value is determined, we assign a Jira priority (i.e. lowest, low, medium, high, highest, urgent), and give each Feature a numerical rank.  We then must manually update Jira to reflect the Priority of each Feature.

Unfortunately Features with identical priority values are ranked equally.  However we have set the weights so that it's less likely to get duplicate values. With 150 active features at any time, it gives us a clear picture of what's important both at PI Planning and when unexpected work volumes occur.

[Al Chen]

Interesting use case! For each question, does everyone (product, eng, sales, etc.) get to answer the questions or is it only engineering?

[Jim D]

In this case, it's the business consumer requesting the feature that answers the questions. So the business provides the answers, which are then validated by my team.  It's part of our Intake process as we are a consumer-facing organization.

Since we're delivering against Enterprise-wide and worldwide objectives, it's important for us to make the business accountable for this priorization.

Of course, if there's contention (this now happens rarely) we can set up a quick discussion with the different business groups to identify which initiative will take priority.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you so much!

Haven't thought of such case before, we set priorities manually in Jira and sometimes get duplicates indeed.

[Al Chen]

One of my favorite topics! I spoke to a few people at the Atlassian '24 conference a few months ago and led a Braindate on this topic as well. Summarize my findings and analysis in this post if anyone's interested: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/episode-127-spreadsheets-vs-jira-which-one-better-your-al-chen-gou8e

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you so much! We'll share your post with the team.

[Marcos Milanesio]

Hi! 

We use JXL: (with conditional format, sum up, group by, bulk, etc..)

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1224710/jxl-sheets-hierarchy-structure-sum-up-time-in-status-table?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

An other alternative is Excel-like Bulk Issue

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214580/excel-like-bulk-issue-editor-for-jira-spreadsheet-table?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

:-)

[Stiltsoft support]

Thanks for the tip!

[Al Chen]

What limitations have you seen with the JXL add-on? I've heard of a few people using it.

[Alex Akilov]

Atlassian cloud Enterprise includes Atlassian Analytics, which can be used to perform more sophisticated reporting vs. just Jira.  One problem you may face is if you needed to combine data from your Atlassian apps with data from other systems and correlate that data in a report/dashboard.  Analytics looks in the Atlassian Data Lake as the data source, so you would need to either import all other data into the data lake to use in your Analytics dashboard or get your Atlassian data out to another data repository (e.g. Power BI) using a CSV export and run the report from your external system (which you may still have to do if you must use some external dashboarding facility).

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you!

[lisa_simpkins]

I definitely use spreadsheets out of necessity, both for internal reports and customer reports.  Dashboards aren't sufficient.  Three reasons are (1) capturing data as of a moment in time, (2) trending period over period, and (3) SLA status values. For reporting, I need SLAs noted as Met, Pending or Breached, not the time remaining in hours (plus or minus).  

[Alex Akilov]

Lisa, you need a Data warehouse/Data Lake to maintain data trend info as Jira only holds just in time data.  Atlassian cloud (Enterprise) includes a Data Lake and an Analytics platform that can be used to run trend reports and more advanced calculations.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you for sharing! Your cases seem very reasonable indeed.

[Al Chen]

You can get time series data via the API. We use get changelog data via the API to see when issues change statuses.

[Haddon Fisher]

I use Google Sheets to do pretty much any complex reporting on Jira data. I'm not super proud of this approach; it evolved it more out of necessity than anything else, but as much as I try to get away from it I always come crawling back.

I'm still fleshing this out, but there's some basic outlining of how I've found success here.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you!

We try to let our customers do the Jira reporting in Confluence (while enhancing the native Jira Issues macro) but don't have much expertise regarding Jira (somehow we don't use it much).

[Al Chen]

Nice write-up! I laughed when you mentioned eazyBI. Based on your write-up you're basically building a spreadsheet model that is easy to update and maintain.

[Chris Marchese]

I often combine Jira with spreadsheets for enhanced project management. While Jira is great for workflows and collaboration, spreadsheets are useful for detailed calculations, aggregation, visualization, and data export. Some tips:

1. Export Jira data to Excel: Use Jira's export feature to analyze and visualize data in Excel.
2. Sync with Google Sheets: Use tools like Google Sheets Jira integration for real-time data syncing.
3. Use Jira plugins: Consider plugins like Jira Cloud for Excel or Google Sheets to automate data transfer and updates.
4. Custom workarounds: Automate routine tasks using tools like Zapier or custom scripts.

Combining these tools can streamline your workflow and address any limitations of using "pure Jira" alone.

[Al Chen]

Yeah what's interesting (something I pointed out in my article) is that all these workarounds to streamline workflows is what Jira Align is supposed to solve. Lot of reporting and workflows happen in Excel and Google Sheets and Align is supposed to help with needing these workarounds when you need to do higher-level reporting.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you!

It's exactly what we thought: keeping spreadsheets synchronized with Jira within Jira itself or using export functions will definitely help the product team that is used to all the Excel-like features.

[Wendy Grapentine]

I am tasked with giving ticket updates every two weeks.  I was using just Excel, but, co-opted Jira Product Discovery to assist with this.  The reasons: 
1) I can link the Jira ticket with automatically updated status to the Jira Product Discovery Ticket much easier than on a Spreadsheet.  And since it shows the linked ticket status, I can update the Product Discovery Issue status very quickly without having to toggle back and forth between Jira and Excel.
2) I can group the tickets under categories really easy (drag and drop).
3) I created a custom column called "update message" that is set up using text field type.  I can write a short message there to update where the ticket is in the process of being done.
4) When I started this in Jira Product Discovery, my intention was to direct everyone to that page, but, my stakeholders are virtually technophobes, so I just export the current state of the Jira Product Discovery to an Excel sheet.  (Then in Excel I have to manually create the categories (since the export doesn't catch that) and just make sure they are grouped correctly.  While doing this still causes me cut and paste in Excel, at least the "meat and potatoes" portion has already been done in Jira Product Discovery!)

Background to answer:  My company is not solely software related, my company is primarily a credit union services company.  We work with credit unions and are responsible for the printing and mailing of physical bank statements and the display of electronic bank statements.  My team is responsible for maintaining the data collection software and website as well as the software that keeps the warehouse printer jobs going. 

Would be happy to show how I set things up is anyone is interested.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you so much for the thorough description!

Of course, we'll be glad to arrange a live call - please book a suitable time slot here (please mention that we are going to discuss Jira cause the Calendly link is a general one).

Also as we use our shared account here, please check this Community article - there you can find out who stands behind the @Stiltsoft support (and the photos are also attached). :) 

[Alexey]

Its sounds like you are collecting Jira data for analysis. There are two good option to analyze data in Jira:  "EazyBi" and "RichFilters". Both apps metrics can be shown @Confluence 

For advanced Project Management style reports and calculations you can use "BigPicture" or "Tempo Structure".

[Wendy Grapentine]

Ah!  I forgot, yes, while those tools would be more helpful, I alas, cannot use them because they cost money!  JPD is free for up to three users so that is why I use it.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you!

[Sankalp Dubey]

We use Google Spreadsheets for analysis of the sprint and time tracking of the tasks. The primary tool we use for integration between Jira and Spreadsheets is Coefficient by salesforce.

[Stiltsoft support]

Thanks for sharing! 

[Al Chen]

Curious why you use Coefficient over the free Atlassian Jira import Workplace extension for Google Sheets?

[Tere Pile]

Excel/GoogleSheets as needed, not recommended by admins, we have Structure to help flatten views for planning, etc.  

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you! Just the same: admins don't like any switching between different products and prefer to keep everything in one place.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Better Excel Exporter is the Swiss army knife of creating powerful Excel spreadsheets out of Jira data (export/report samples).

It will produce ready-made XLSX output (no need to "clean up" a CSV or manually add a chart every time!) from a template that itself is a regular XLSX file.

The templates are super-flexible and support formulas, functions, scripting (in Groovy), calculated fields, charts, pivot tables and pivot charts, VBA macros and so much more!

(Discl. it is a paid and supported app developed by our team for more than 10 years. It is free for 10 users!)

[Stiltsoft support]

Thank you!