Reporting · 3 min read
Exporting to CSV
Exporting the current filtered view, what the 34 columns hold, and why values are prefixed with an apostrophe.
Exporting the register
The Export CSV button sits in the register toolbar. It exports the view you are looking at — whatever your search, status filter, category filter and overdue or archived toggles currently produce.
- Filter the register first Narrow it to what you actually want. Exporting everything and deleting rows in a spreadsheet is the slower route.
- Select "Export CSV"
The file downloads with a name of the form
improvedesk-ops-2026-08-31.csv— the project key and the date.
What is in the file
Thirty-four columns — everything on the record, plus the figures the app derives.
| Reference | Title | Status | PDCA stage | Priority | Source | Category |
| Service | Owner | Sponsor | Raised by | Raised at | Target date | Implemented at |
| Verified at | Closed at | Review date | Benefit type | Forecast benefit | Realised benefit | Cost estimate |
| Net benefit | RICE score | Composite score | KPI progress | Age (days) | Cycle time (days) | Overdue |
| Linked issues | Standard references | Tags | Risks | Rejection reason | Archived |
Three things are worth knowing about the values:
- Owner, sponsor and raised by are display names, not account ids. The app resolves them from Jira as it builds the file, so the export is readable by somebody who has never seen the register.
- Dates are plain
YYYY-MM-DD, which spreadsheets parse without argument. - Derived figures are included — RICE, composite score, measure progress, age, cycle time and overdue — so you do not have to recompute them.
The apostrophes
Open the file in a text editor and you may notice a value written as
'=HYPERLINK(...) — with a leading apostrophe that was not in the
register.
That is deliberate. A spreadsheet treats a cell beginning =,
+, - or @ as a
formula. Free text in an improvement register is written by people, and a description that
happens to start with one of those characters would execute rather than display when the file is
opened. The apostrophe forces the cell to be read as text.
Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice all hide the apostrophe and show the intended value, so in practice you will only see it if you open the raw file.
This matters more than it sounds. A register exported from Jira is usually opened by a service manager the same afternoon, and an unescaped formula in a free-text field is a genuine spreadsheet injection rather than a cosmetic nuisance.
The row limit
An export is capped at 200 rows per file, to stay inside the time budget Forge allows a single request.
If your filtered view holds more than that, narrow it and export in parts — by category, by status, or by owner. In practice a management review looks at a slice rather than the whole register, so the cap is rarely reached.
What to do with it
- Management review pack. Export the open improvements sorted by score, and attach the file to the minutes. It is a point-in-time record of what was discussed.
- Audit evidence. Filter to a source — external audit, say — and export. The file carries the dates, owners and verification stamps an auditor asks for.
- Benefit reporting. The forecast, realised, cost and net columns give finance what they need without them needing access to Jira.
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