Forums

Articles
Create
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

how to convert the time spent field exported from jira into the same format as in jira

Sreedevi Raman Pisharody August 20, 2025

I have exported a jira filtered issues into excel, however the time spent field shows differently in excel compared to the what we see in jira.

How can i convert the excel sheet timespent column into the same format as in jira?

2 answers

0 votes
Aron Gombas
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
August 21, 2025

@Sreedevi Raman Pisharody The values are exported as seconds, by default. Those are very hard to read, I agree.

Although the Jira display format is easy to read, you can't make calculations on those textual values in Excel. It is not trivial to add "3d 4h" to "2h 30m", it is not trivial to compare them, etc.

Therefore, we decided to export time values as (decimal) hours, like "2.5" in Better Excel Exporter. It is both easy to read, unless you have very large values, and can be calculated on.

See column H in this example export:

jira-excel-export-issues-selected-fields.png

You may want to consider this.

(Discl. it is a paid and supported app developed by our team. Free for 10 users!)

0 votes
Bill Sheboy
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
August 20, 2025

Hi @Sreedevi Raman Pisharody 

You seem to be asking a question about Microsoft Excel, and you posted this question in the Jira community.  That Jira field is "pretty printing" a number of seconds as a text value, such as "3d, 4h".

I suspect the answer depends upon your specific version of Excel and any addins you have.  I recommend checking the Microsoft product documentation and performing a web search to check for options, such as using formulas and division to repeatedly extract the various time elements.

Kind regards,
Bill

Sreedevi Raman Pisharody August 20, 2025

Thanks Bill, i completely understand the question is related to excel. I have tried various formulas, related to get the value converted to jira format, but no luck. I am unable to identify whether the value which has been exported from jira is it in secs or minutes.

 

Is there a way i could figure it out to notice that the time spent column value is in which format getting exported from jira?

Bill Sheboy
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
August 20, 2025

The export value from Jira is seconds.  And so to convert that, assume the days are 8 hours long, and progressively divide and truncate the value to get the pieces.

Stefan Stadler
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
August 20, 2025

Additionally, if Jira shows more than 5 days, it converts it to weeks. These settings/assumptions that Jira takes are configured under Administration > Issues > Time Tracking. The only thing that will not be configurable is how the data is stored. This will always be the amount of seconds.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
DEPLOYMENT TYPE
SERVER
VERSION
9.12.16
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events