Hot tip: Copy-paste your existing work into Jira Software

[#1]

Did you know there’s a simple way to bring existing work into team-managed projects in Jira Software?

If you have a list of work items in a document or spreadsheet, you can copy and paste the content directly into Jira, and choose whether or not to auto-create multiple issues at once. Each new line of text (or each cell in a spreadsheet or table) can automatically become a separate issue.

Here’s how:

1. Copy the existing content from your external document or spreadsheet to your clipboard. (Make sure each work item/task is on a new line, or in a separate cell on a spreadsheet/table. You can have a maximum of 255 characters per task, and can copy a maximum of 20 tasks at a time.)

2. There are two ways to copy-paste existing work:

   • In a team-managed scrum project, go to the backlog, and select + Create issue under a sprint or under the backlog section:
     

   • In a team-managed kanban project, you can go to the board or backlog, and select + Create issue at the bottom of a column on the board (see example below) or at the bottom of the backlog:
     
     

3. Paste your content. You will be given the option to auto-create multiple issues (in the example below, 20 lines of text have been copy/pasted), or create a single issue (if you’ve copied less than 255 characters):
   
   

And that’s it! You can copy/paste up to 20 work items at a time.

[Tina_Le]

Copy paste is not working for me. Instead, I get a long string of text on a single line item

[Mandy Webb]

This is not working for me either.  I am used to this functionality from Trello (another Atlassian product) so I was surprised it did not work.  Is there a setting to activate this functionality or is this only available in paid versions?  This is a "deal breaker" for me.

[Omar Ortiz]

It used to work, but now it doesn't. I came across this post while searching for information on whether something had changed for this feature. Is there a bug already raised to fix it?

[Product Team]

Hi, I used to be able to copy/paste multiple issues at once. Like the other folx here said: copying and pasting the text from both excel (separate rows) or word (separate lines) results in one long string of text in one issue, not separate issues created. Our users need the ability to bulk add issues. It's very inconvenient that this feature is not working. Can you please follow-up with a timeline for this bug fix? Thank you!

[Sarena Maron-Kolitch]

This is not working for us. Can you please look into fixing this bug? Thank you!