Markdown Text Exported to Excel - How to "Reformat"

[John Elder]

Hello fellow Jira users and admins!  We are attempting something very basic: extract data from Jira and populate it into a merge file, in Microsoft Word, to create a PDF "book" for executive review.  Not hard, very straightforward it seems... export filter to Excel; map Excel field names to Word merge file; hit merge; save as PDF

The problem is that the "Description" field in our instance is a field that allows text formatting... bold, italics, indents, underlines, etc.  When the data is exported to Excel the "formatting" marks are brought out as well.  What should be a simple sub-section header reads like this:  Clarity ‘How To’ Part II:

I found the below article regarding the specific functions that each markdown makes... indents, bold letters, etc.  But how can I apply these markdown rules in Excel, to take what is a plain-text export and make it formatted again?

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/markdown-and-keyboard-shortcuts/

Or... is there a way to export fully formatted text from Jira, that I am missing?  I know you export to Word, and that maintains formatting, but then it doesn't work for our needs since it is not in table format.  :(

I'd appreciate any advice or thoughts you all might have.  Thank you!

[Melissa Averkamp]

@John Elder Did you ever find a solution to this?  I'm running into this same issue in the cloud version.  Prior to upgrading to cloud, wiki markup exported as seen on screen, but in cloud the markdown exports as the 'answer' to the formula but in text form rather than the background color I would prefer.  Thanks!

[John Elder]

No, we never found a solution to this and I ended up writing an entire translation program in Excel to format everything correctly.  We did have luck with the RestAPI pulling in properly formatted text, but never through Jira exports.  I'm sorry.