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Boards sub-filters are useless - prove me wrong!

Boyan Iliev
Contributor
October 10, 2025

Hi all,

 

I've been reviewing and reading about the boards sub-filters over and over and I see no real use of them. I'm specifically talking about the Board sub-filter defined in the Board settings.

 

They can "refine" your main filter etc. etc. Why don't you refine your main filter to start with and use the quick filters for any ad-hoc searches?

 

What am I missing and how do you use the sub-filters?

2 answers

2 votes
John Funk
Community Champion
October 11, 2025

Hi Boyan - Thanks for the post. I use them as temporary board changes without having to change the entire board filter to test something or, again, make a short-term temporary change to the board. Also, the board filters are often used in other places such as dashboards or reports as @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_  has mentioned. So you don't want to be monkeying with the underlying filter for certain changes. 

And another use is that two boards can use the same underlying board filter but be tweaked just a little differently from each other to not have to create a second filter, which reduces maintenance on the admin or filter owner. 

Boyan Iliev
Contributor
October 12, 2025

Thank you for the insight John,

  • temporary changes is something I do understand. I could argue if a sub-filter is really the best place to do this. Ideally you do not want to test changes on "production" dashboard. The more I think about it - its up to personal preference and possibly JIRA setup. 
  • JIRA Reporting is nothing you can win me over. Atlassian made it easy enough to export the data and any data transformation and visualization tool can make magic with it. And you don't depend on filters in this case!

    I do celebrate this Atlassian decision!

  • Having boards with identical filters but different sub-filter is a niche use case in my opinion, but probably the only real-world usage I've heard so far.

    Having said this - I don't like the maintenance note. As an admin I prefer all boards having dedicated filters and manage them in a single place, than having to check both filter and sub-filter for each board. Going back to my JIRA export note - I can easily export the filters and audit them in a tool of my choice (excel :) ), but there is NO option to export filter + sub-filter.
0 votes
Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_
Community Champion
October 10, 2025

Hi @Boyan Iliev 

the sub-filters are useful if you want to hide certain issues from the board without them being removed from reports. The Reports only take issues into account, that are still in that board filter result. Sub-filters only change what you see on the board.

You can use them to hide done issues before 7 days for instance. Honestly: I've not had any other use cases than this, but I am sure there are more.

Boyan Iliev
Contributor
October 10, 2025

Thank you @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ , this is a great point. Although it touches on another JIRA feature I actively avoid - reports.

 

These days there are multiple ways to pull JIRA data into data-manipulation and visualization friendly tools. Even for non-admins/non-dev it is relatively easy to setup a custom report using a simple "Jira Cloud for Sheets" .....making the default JIRA reports look underwhelming.

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