How can I import/paste/whatever content into the Description field without losing formatting?

[Esther Strom]

My company has been a Jira shop for seven years. We were recently purchased by another company that's been using Rally, and they want to migrate to Jira.

One pain point we're having is getting formatted content into the Description field. (We are doing this story by story, as we're doing a selective migration, rather than a wholesale system import.)

Is there any way to ensure that formatted content (bold, italics, font colors, tables, etc.) gets carried over into the Jira description field?

I'm open to using a plugin, and did see that there's a Jira/Rally connector, but it's only available for Server, and we're on Cloud.

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello Esther,

I took some time searching about the Rally application format options and I found out that it uses Markdown formatting, which is the same format that JIRA uses in the new issue view (The old issue view uses Markup format).

That been said, have you tried to copy your Rally text and paste directly in the JIRA issue while in the New issue view?

To activate the new issue view you can click in your profile picture > Personal Settings > turn on the new issue view.

If it does not work, try to export the Rally tasks to CSV and copy/paste the description text from there.

Let us know if this option helps and have a great weekend!

[Esther Strom]

Thank you; the problem was the old vs new view. Issue creation uses the "old view" renderers, so our users will need to create their tickets without content, then open them from a board to get the new view, then paste in their formatted content.

We found that bold/italic/underscore/numbered lists/bulleted lists will copy over correctly; text colors will not copy, nor will tables.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Esther,

Indeed, there are some limitations in the new view formatting, although we are still working to implement new features and make it better.

Let us know if you still have any questions.