Automatically copy specific cells in Excel file to Jira fields

Question

I am looking for an automatic way to extract specific Excel cells from an Excel file from Onedrive ( or an attachment in a Jira Issue) to be entered in an open issue field.

For example, finance use Excel to run their calculation, and I need to extract these final calculation automatically from Excel and add them to a Jira issue field for reporting, dashboard, and documentation.

I am open for CLI solutions or any solution that help with the automation instead of the manuel work.

josh_clearihan · Answer

Has there been any answer to a potential solution?

I found this article which uses automation smart values. See this in the article.

{{attachment.content}}: Returns the content of the attachment, with binary content rendered as a String.

Does this mean we can pull attachment field data from this string?

How we use this to pull field data from an attachment is beyond me. I'm hoping someone in the community can shed some light.

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Omar El-Halabi

welcome to the community!

For an automatic integration, I'm pretty sure you'll need to invoke Jira's REST API from some kind of Excel scripting (I haven't done this in person and can't comment on the details, unfortunately).

Just as food for thought: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at 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 allows editing issue fields via copy/paste; this works within JXL, but also between JXL and pretty much any other app, including Excel. So while it may not happen automatically, you can almost certainly save yourself significant amounts of time. This is how it looks in action:

(I'm using story points here, but it would work for any other field, too.)

I should also add that JXL can do much more than that: From support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting. Depending on your finance department's exact use cases, they may be able to use these features to do their calculations directly in Jira, based on live issue data.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes