Converting Numeric Field to Select List and multiple choices without Loss of data

[Venkat Marella]

we have a numeric filed with the values(1,4,8).Shall we convert this numeric Field to Select List and multiple choices with the values (1,3,5) instead of (1,4,8) without loss of data.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Accepted solution]

Hi @Venkat Marella

welcome to the community. The general way to go here is to create a new custom field (in your case, of type Select List), then copy over the values from the original field to the new field (in your case, with some value transformation in between), and finally delete the old custom field.

For copying over the values, you have a couple of options;

• You might be able to use Jira Automation 
• I've seen people use the CSV bulk import feature
• If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll find great options there, too. E.g., my team and I happen to work on an app in which this should be doable in just a couple of clicks; I'll provide more information below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Just to expand on the last point, this should be easy to do using the app that my team and I are working on, 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 supports bulk editing via copy/paste; within JXL, but also between JXL and pretty much any other app (including, of course, Excel or Google Sheets). This means that you can copy/paste your existing values from JXL to, say, Excel, do your transformations there (e.g., from 4 to 3, etc.), and then copy/paste back into your new custom field.

This is how this looks in action:

(This is just from one column to the other, but you could just copy/paste to Excel/Google Sheets/etc. "in between" and make any value transformations there.)

You can update up to 10000 issues in one action, so you should be done with your work in no time.

Any questions just let me know!