Jira Cloud for Excel: "Scoping out the situation" message and no output is provided

[David Leal]

This is a known problem that happens quite often and not always, I found some workarounds on the web, they work initially but in the end, the problem appears again. I verified it happens more often in Excel Desktop, but now I happening to me in the Excel web version:

it gets stacked with this message: "Scoping out the situation" and no result is produced when you want to sync your Jira issues with Excel. For this specific query, I am trying to return no more than 20 issues.

Note: I know there are other products in the Marketplace to facilitate Excel-Jira integration, but I am only interested in solving this problem for this product: Jira Cloud for Excel (official)

Thanks in advance,

David

[David Leal · Accepted solution]

After several days interacting with Atlassian customer support about this issue. Several things to consider based on the recommendations Atlassian provided:

1. Un check the option: Allow Hyperlink in Jira Cloud for Excel settings, it seems to be related to poor performance. Here is the ticket raised by Atlassian Support:

   1. API-692 - Importing issues in Excel with Allow Hyperlinks enabled in the Add-in results in slow performance and randomly gets stuck

   2. There is another ticket related to the same:  API-468 - Importing issue in Excel results in error and never finish
2. Avoid using Excel adornments like conditional formatting in the output of Jira Cloud for Excel. What I did is to have all the Jira Cloud syncs in a single place, with no adornments, just the raw data (and enabled the option Import data into Excel Tables). Instead of using Jira Query, you can use Jira JQL(), which allows you to have in the same Excel tab all the sync work from Jira in a different Excel tables in difference places within the same Excel tab, then you can refer later. To have a separated tab just for processing the information for each Jira Cloud for Excel sync and refer to them by the Excel table name. This pattern will require more tabs, but it is at the end a good practice having the raw data in one place and processed data in another place, so you don't contaminate the raw data with additional transformations, adornments, calculation, etc.

Note: Maybe the first step is enough to improve the performance, but since I did both changes at the same time, I don't know if the first step is enough. 

By doing the above steps you cannot get rid of some errors loading the Add-ins specially after an Office update. As a result of my interaction with Atlassian the following page was updated, providing more guidelines about several errors may occur after an Office update: Jira cloud for excel add-in does not load on desktop and JIRA.JQL function changed. This is the official guideline by Atlassian about several issues related to this Add-ins load after Office update. Please keep in mind that the connected app you need to remove access for both Add-ins (Excel and Google) has the same name: Jira Cloud for Spreadsheets. 

 I hope it helps,

David

[Stephen Chisholm]

Thanks ... Just doing the first one seems to have solved the problem for me.