The reason why it is useful is not the lack of something in JIRA.
You may have JIRA instances in sub-networks, not accessible from a meeting room where you organize a CCB, or from outside your company for security reasons. Then, usually, the common way to proceed is for the Project Manager to extract info in an Excel sheet, from JIRA, working with people concerned, and then he comes back to JIRA, and ... cries because he's got to update all the tickets manually

https://studio.atlassian.com/browse/JIM-257

I agree this would be a helpful addition to have. We have to use 2 databases JIRA and Dev Track(Publishers Side) and it would be nice to be able to import bugs from Dev Track to the JIRA project frequently so that it is all up to date. At this moment that doesn't seem possible without a lot of work. It would also be good to use at an early phase of task building for a project. If we could import updated material as tasks are fleshed out rather than having to update each task individually it would stream line everything more.

Does that mean that there is no hope to see this improvment in the next releases ?
It is important for us to know if we start development by our own or if we wait for the next release...
I agree with Hardjono Harjadi, we need the same thing : in meetings with customers, we don't have any connection with Jira. Only one excel sheet where we update/create issues....

I suspect the only reason you use Excel is because Jira doesn't have a spreadsheet like way to mass edit issues (that's why we did)
We now use Greenhopper instead. Its not like a spreadsheet but it does most of what we were doing in the spreadsheet.
There can definitely be improvements in the UI (for speed and ease of working) but its good enough to dump trying to extend CVS import.

This is one of the most requested feature request in our company. Here is the common use case:
1. Project Manager creates all of the New Features/Improvements including subtasks (done through CSV import).
2. Project Manager assigns the issues to the developers in JIRA
3. The developers provides their initial scoping in JIRA
4. Project Manager exports the issues from JIRA to Excel
5. Project Manager reviews the estimates in the project meeting. During the meeting, the issues can be reassigned to different people which in turn change the effort estimate due to the different level of expertise.
6. Ideally the Project Manager should be able to reassign and change the estimates in the meeting and import the changes back to JIRA.

Hi,

I need this functionality too. I would be highly obliged if Atlassian would let us know if they plan on creating this feature in the web interface itself or we should go by Anton suggestion of using a SOAP client.

Writing a SOAP client seems a lot more work than changing the code, as pointed out by Emmanuel

Thanks,
Ashish

I'm also very interested in this feature !
Actually it could be simple to adapt csv import in order to be able to modify issues not only to create issues.
If the issue id is present in the database -> it is an update of an issue.
If the issue id is not present in the database -> it is a creation of an issue.

It can take a lot of time if we had to develop this feature with soap. And no macro for excel is provided.

We would very much like to have this feature. Editing issues in Excel would be an extremely handy feature for updating our database.

Hi,
vote for this feature!

Any status update?