Export Jira Worklogs to Excel for Timesheets

Why "export worklogs" isn't one button in Jira

Jira Cloud tracks time spent per issue, and the worklog tab on an issue shows who logged what and when. What it doesn't offer is a report across issues: no built-in screen turns "every worklog for these projects between two dates" into a spreadsheet. Teams end up opening issues one at a time, copying numbers by hand, or building a JQL search and exporting issue fields that don't actually include the underlying worklog entries.

A worklog and an issue are different things. An issue can have ten worklogs from five different people on five different days; exporting the issue list tells you nothing about who logged what, when. See why Jira's time tracking report doesn't cover multiple projects for why the closest native report doesn't fill this gap either.

What a real worklog export needs

• A date range, not just "all time" — a sprint, a month, or a custom window.
• Filtering by author and by project, so the export matches who you're actually billing or reporting on.
• The worklog comment, since that's usually where the actual task description lives — and it needs to be readable text, not Jira's internal document format.
• A row per worklog, not per issue, so two people logging time on the same ticket show up as two lines with two authors and two durations.

Getting the comment text right

Jira Cloud stores worklog comments in Atlassian Document Format (ADF), a structured JSON tree, not plain text. Anything that reads the API directly and dumps the raw comment field into a spreadsheet cell shows JSON, not the sentence someone typed. Getting readable text means walking that document tree — paragraphs, lists, and inline marks — and flattening it back into plain text before it reaches the workbook.

Checking the numbers add up

1. Pick the date range and confirm it matches what you intend — Jira's "logged on" date, not the issue's created or updated date.
2. Export a detail sheet: one row per worklog, with issue key, author, date, time spent, and the flattened comment.
3. Build (or check) a summary that totals hours by person across days or weeks, with a grand total.
4. Cross-check: the summary's totals should equal the sum of the detail sheet for that same person and window. If they don't, something in the date filtering is off.