Excel (XLSX) output

Excel output is the same template as your PDF, projected into sheets instead of pages. Use it when the recipient wants to sort, filter, pivot and sum rather than read. Available in Free and Standard.

Only the parts of a template that have a row shape reach the workbook. Everything else is omitted — and named on the Report info sheet, so you never have to guess what was left out.

Try it before you install

Download a sample workbook — five sheets from one template: Report info, a Summary of the KPI cards, an issue table, category counts and worklogs with a subtotal. Open it and sort the date column; that is the whole argument for the format.

The file is produced by the same code path as a real export, from synthetic issues, and it is regenerated on every build — so what you download is what Exportelier writes today, not a mock-up.

Already installed? The designer's Excel preview tab lists the sheets your template would produce — names, column and row counts, and everything left out with the reason — without generating a file and without using one of your monthly exports.

Cells are typed, not text

This is the whole point of the format. A date is a date, a number is a number, so a date column sorts chronologically and a number column sums.

• Dates use Excel's short-date format and date-times yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm, so both stay unambiguous whatever your locale is set to.
• Durations — time spent, original and remaining estimates — are decimal hours with two decimal places. The unit is named in the column header, for example Time Spent (h), because a column of unlabelled 7.5s is a support ticket.
• Percentages on a category sheet are plain numbers on a 0–100 scale, not fractions.
• Multi-value fields (labels, components, versions) join into one text cell; rich text becomes plain text with wrapping switched on.

Every sheet gets a frozen header row and filter dropdowns. Where a table carries a total, it is written as a subtotal, so the figure follows your filter instead of ignoring it.

Which components become sheets

Each of these becomes one sheet, in the order they appear in the template:

Component	Sheet contents
Issue table	One row per issue, one column per configured column
Matrix	Row buckets × column buckets, with totals when configured
Category chart	Category, Count, Percent
Time-series chart	The bucket date plus one column per series
Worklog table	Worklog rows, with time spent in decimal hours
Change history	Changes with when, who, field, from and to
Subtasks, SLAs, approvals	Their existing column sets
Change-report lists	The issues added or removed, and the fields that moved

Two components have a row form but never a sheet of their own. KPI cards each become one row on a shared Summary sheet (Metric, Value, Source, Issues), which only appears when the template has at least one. A report notice — the completeness warning a report writes about its own data — is reproduced on the Report info sheet, because a report that drops its own "here is what I left out" warning is exactly the failure that notice exists to prevent.

Components that only work inside a repeater

Worklogs, change history, subtasks, SLAs and approvals describe one issue. They become a sheet only inside a repeater over an issue set; on their own there is no issue to read them from, and they are omitted with that reason.

The same applies to a single field. Inside an issue repeater it becomes one column, and all fields of that repeater collapse into a single Fields sheet covering every issue. Outside one it is a lone value with no row, and it is omitted.

What is omitted, and why

• Layout and page elements — headings, text, images, dividers, page breaks, columns, containers and signature blocks. A sheet has no page, so these have no cell representation.
• Issue content without a row shape — comments, attachments, links and progress bars.
• Context blocks — sprint, release and backlog headers and their statistics. These state single facts about the export rather than rows.
• Watermarks, headers and footers. A watermark is not approximated as a banner row, because a marker above the header would break every formula, filter and sort the format exists for.

If a template contains nothing tabular at all, Exportelier does not produce an empty workbook. The export dialog shows Excel greyed out with the reason — This template has no table, chart or list to put in a sheet — rather than hiding the option.

The Report info sheet

Always the first sheet, always present. Three columns — Section, Item, Detail — and up to six sections:

• Export — when the workbook was generated, which template produced it, and which export context it came from.
• Sources — every data source by name with its issue count, and Source limited to N of M issue(s). where a source was capped. A source that could not be resolved is named here too, with the reason.
• Not exported — every omitted component with the reason above, and a count when the same omission happened more than once.
• Content — what was shortened rather than lost silently: Rows omitted by a table limit, Rows omitted by this edition's row limit, Shortened cells (a cell over Excel's 32,767-character limit) and Cells with control characters removed.
• Report notice — the report's own completeness warning, verbatim.
• Sheets — only when there was nothing to export at all.

Read it first. If a sheet is shorter than you expect, this sheet says why.

Row limits

Each table renders at most 200 rows in Free and 500 in Standard. This ceiling belongs to your edition, not to the format: it applies to PDF, Word and Markdown identically, so a workbook and a PDF of the same template, exported by the same user, report the same numbers.

500 is also the most issues a single data source can supply, so on Standard the ceiling never binds — the only limit you meet is the row limit you set on the table yourself. When a limit does apply, the number of rows it removed is counted on Report info.

Where Excel is available

Every multi-issue export: JQL search, boards, sprints, releases, backlogs, Special Reports and saved reports, plus scheduled exports from Exportelier Automation. Larger exports run as background jobs exactly as the other formats do.

Three places do not offer it:

• Single-issue export, including the Jira Automation action. A one-row workbook is not a spreadsheet, so Exportelier refuses rather than producing one: Excel export needs a set of issues. Export from a board, sprint, release, backlog, filter or report instead.
• One file per issue (ZIP), for the same reason multiplied — an Excel export always produces one workbook.
• Word Template Mode, which is DOCX-in, DOCX-out only.

Imported dashboards become multi-sheet workbooks

A dashboard import turns each gadget's saved filter into a named data source, and every component bound to one becomes its own sheet named after both — Issues — Open escalations, Categories — Sprint bugs. The Sources section then lists each filter once with its issue count, so one sheet lists the issues and one line says where they came from.

Gadget titles are imported as headings, which have no cell representation. Expect to see them counted under Not exported; the sheet names carry the filter name instead.

Sheet names and signing

Excel restricts sheet names to 31 characters and forbids : \ / ? * [ ], so long source names are shortened and made unique automatically. Digital signatures apply to PDF only — a workbook is not signed.