Prerequisites
The latest Microsoft Visual Studio for Office Runtime from Microsoft must be installed on your PC. It can be downloaded directly from Microsoft here.
Installation
Latest Installer: R4J_Excel_4.6.0-806-combined.msi
Release notes: Excel Addin 4.6
The installer works for both Office 32- and 64-bit installations.
Before installing the add-in, all instances of Excel must be closed.
Configure the Jira connection
After running the installer, a new ribbon tab, "JIRA" should appear in Excel
Select the Settings option under the Jira ribbon. To connect, enter the Jira server URL, login user name, and password. It is possible to connect to different instances of Jira servers. (However, only one instance can be active at a time.)
Select the Test button in the Settings dialog to check if the add-in can successfully connect to the given instance of Jira.
If the new ribbon tab is not visible, please follow these steps.
Connection Settings
Before working with your issues, the connection to your Jira instance must be configured. Select the option Settings and enter the Jira URL and your username and password. With Save as... you can set up connections to different Jira servers.
Jira Personal Access Token: This is an alternate connection option (as of Jira 8.14) - see Jira via Personal access token.
Save password/tokens: Stores your password in an encrypted form on your client location.
Show changed values as Excel comments: Shows differences identified using the Check option as Excel comments.
Show Issue Key column as hyperlink: Displays Issue Keys as hyperlinks.
Maximum number of comments per issue: Number of latest comments downloaded from Jira when using the "Comments" field, 0 (zero) retrieves all comments. A value “0” (zero) retrieves all comments.
After establishing a connection to a Jira instance, you can download issues with the Load Data option and upload them with the Upload Data option. See Load, Create and Update Issues.
Comments
Issue comments are displayed as Excel notes.
Security Considerations
The communication between our Excel Plugin and Jira on your instance works via REST API communication. This way of communication is end-to-end encrypted when the user enters a HTTPS Jira link in the settings. The used encryption can be defined in your Jira instance, see https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-modify-the-ssl-tls-version-jira-uses-for-outbound-connections-1064093000.html for more details.
If the user select the “Remember Me” option in settings for the instance, the account´s password is stored encrypted on the local computer in the settings file. You can find the settings.json file at the folder
%appdata%\ease solutions\Office to Jira Integration
Logfile
To identify any issues in the communication with the Jira instance as well as data quality, you can check the log file by following the link called “Go to the logging folder” in the settings dialog.