select multiple issues

[Jason Jason]

I've had some client feed back. I want to select around 20 issues that have no unifing factor in Jira and bulk change them to have a different fix version.

But ther is no shift-click select. There are no check boxes. the only way to choose is "all" or "items on this page" That is complete nonsense. How am I supposed to manage hundreds of tickets when I can't just click to select the ones I need and change them?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You've not tested this very far.

When you select "bulk edit" on a filter, it lists all the issues in the filter with check boxes to refine the list.

This happens a step AFTER you have said "all" or "all on this page". The all/all-on-page is just a quick way to get started.

[Jason Jason]

#facepalm# Didn't even occur to me. I was assuming it would behave like the Plan Board does where you select a number of items and move them all at once. Thanks for the heads up.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

:-) The boxes were immensely small in the version I first used as well, and I still don't think they're blindingly obvious in the latest version.

[Yggy King]

Thanks for that -- the Tools menu is buried enough as-is, and then really makes it look like you need to come up with a filter that selects all the issues you want. Works nicely once you know though. ;)

[Kyle Pennell]

I agree that it's not very intuitive to have to do a bulk operation every time you want to select more than 1 issue.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

So where does it move from "not bulk" to "bulk"? How would you implement "select x issues" differently from bulk edit? As you need to do all the same work anyway?

[Kyle Pennell]

In many other pieces of software, you can select a list of things without having to go through a 4-5 step process to make changes on them. It's frustrating because most other pieces of software allow users to select lists that way. Oh well!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Jira lets you do that. Try clicking bulk-edit from the list, you'll be offered the option to select some of them.

[Anurag Khanna]

Jira has such a poorly designed interface. They should have a team of UX professionals to re-design it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

In the 5 years since this question was asked, Atlassian have done that.  See Jira Cloud.

[Anurag Khanna]

done what? I am using Jira Cloud only.
The discoverability and usability is still as poor.

[Akhil Krishnan]

I have a very peculiar issue here during the bulk update. The checkbox is not available for the comment box during bulk update on version 7.13.0

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

@Anurag Khanna- the Cloud UX was designed to replace the older server interface by a dedicated UX team.  (Personally, I think they failed, but that does make the term "UX professional" exactly the opposite of what I would now be looking for)

@Akhil Krishnan- I would guess that you do not have "comment" permission on one or more of the issues you are updating.

[scott coleman]

I'm using Jira Cloud - I still can't figure out how to select only some issues in a view. When I "select" an issue it opens that issue. I need to stay in the list view to select all of the issues I need.

[David Thabet]

Having the same problem.

[swift]

'Bulk Edit' is not usable.  Once I click on the 'Bulk Edit' link, the issues get put into willy-nilly order instead of the order I had selected, so I am left with hunting down the issues I wanted one by one anyway.  Jira could use the tagline "Making simple task management harder every day."

[webks GmbH]

I completely agree. Jira is missing checkboxes for bulk edit in nearly all areas. This is a very very important point. Is there any feature request about that?

It should be added everywhere and would fix a lot of usability problems, especially for projects and issues!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I can't see what problems would be fixed by cluttering up a display with checkboxes all over the place.

There are a couple of open requests for improving how the bulk-edit works, but nothing for throwing it around everywhere. 

The improvements I personally like the look of are on the second screen.  As now, you run a filter that is quite sweeping, click the bulk-edit option and it gives you the list with include/exclude boxes.  Then the improvements would be the ability to do something like quick-filters (show a sub-set to concentrate on ticking/unticking) and be able to sort the list dyynaimically (i.e. what ever gets selected stays selected whatever I do with sort or sub-filters)

[webks GmbH]

Well perhaps you had bad experiences with checkboxes, but I think you can agree that nearly every successful software product which works with lists (let it be thunderbird / outlook / windows , ...) allows to multi-select items and execute a task on them.

It doesn't have to be checkboxes, but selecting several tasks (and also all) by symbol, CTRL, ... is a quite good and old idea to speed things up ;)