No Excel export of issues in search results after 7.3.0 update

[Andreas G. Nie-Fröhlich]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Working with search results

Since the update to 7.3.0, we're missing the "Export to Excel" menu item. Do we have to enable it somewhere somehow?

[CVP]

I was hoping that the answer at the bottom of this page would help https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-excel-export-of-issues-no-longer-opens-correctly-838403242.html

It does not. (Not for me, anyway.)

[Andreas G. Nie-Fröhlich]

Thanks for the link, I need to test this.

But why does the documentation still talk about the Excel export for 7.3.0 if it has been disabled since 7.2 already? Seems like a cut&paste error of the JIRA documentation team 

And regarding the link you shared. It says at the bottom " we've introduced a more robust, flexible exporter in the CSV export". How in the world is this CSV export mor flexible?!? When I export my search results, I have multiple commas in the title, description, error message, time protocol and comment fields. That screws up the whole file completely and renders it useless.

Is it possible to configure the CSV export somehow so that the export is usable again? Or am I using this feature incorrectly?

[Lacey McDonnell]

All the CSV should do is separate column headers. Commas in your output should not matter. Can  you show an example of the erroneous export in screenshot?

[Andreas G. Nie-Fröhlich]

Sure. I've constructed an example that's close to a real world example.

While doing so, I noticed that Excel doesn't recognize the comma separation at first. But if you force the comma separator on it, the import works. So far, so good. Unless, there are newlines, e.g. in the description. In that case, that issue is torn into multiple lines:

excel-import-mess.jpg

Therefore, my original claim stands: the CSV export is either unusable or I'm doing something wrong.

Here's the original file I used as Excel import:

[Doug Olson]

I agree  , columns which have multiple fields or tags become seperated in the csv into their own columns...vs staying in their own column under excel...so filtering..etc. is not possible.

[Andreas G. Nie-Fröhlich]

further tests showed that this might be a problem of Excel rather of JIRA/Atlassian. I've tried PlanMaker Viewer and it imports the CSV correctly. So does OpenOffice. Only Excel can't handle a mix of LFs and CRs/LFs (the special non-viewable characters that tell a word processor to break a line).

Either way, the old Excel export worked better with Excel. CSV might be more flexible but has its own problems when it comes to Excel. I suspect, though, that Atlassian can't do anything about it.

[Andreas G. Nie-Fröhlich]

My current workaround is as follows:

1. Export CSV
2. Open it in OpenOffice
3. Save file as XLS file out of OpenOffice
4. Open XLS file in Excel

That way I can work with the file again as intended. Too bad it adds another step and another program, but it beats having to add the data manually each week to my Excel report