Create, Open, and Modify Work Items Using Office Excel

You can use Office Excel to create work items or modify existing work items. Working in Office Excel is an efficient and effective way to add many new work items or to make bulk updates to work items. To add or update work items in Office Excel, you can start by either importing a work item list into Office Excel, or by exporting work items from Team Web Access or Team Explorer.

When you import work items into Office Excel, you can use one of the following methods to create a list of work items:

• Saved query. Use this method when you have created a query that you know contains the set or superset of the work items that you want.

• Work item IDs. Use this method when you know the IDs of the work items that you want and you would rather type those IDs in than to run a query or search from a list.

• Title search. Use this method to find work items that have a common word or phrase in the work item title field, and optionally by team project and work item type.

When you export work items from Team Explorer, you can start with a work item query. For more information, see Finding Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items.

In this topic:

• Adding or Updating Work Items Using Office Excel

• Exporting Work Items from a Query from Team Explorer

• Exporting Select Work Items from Team Explorer

After you import or export work items to Office Excel, you can save the worksheet, add or modify work items, publish changes, or refresh the work item list. For more information, see the following topics:

• Create a Work Item

• Modify Many Work Items at a Time.

• Publish Work Items in Office Excel

• Refresh Work Items and Change the List Type in Office Excel

• Working in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project Connected to Team Foundation Server

Required Permissions

To perform any of the following procedures, you must be a member of the Contributors group or have your View work items in this node and Edit work items in this node permissions set to Allow. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

Adding or Updating Work Items Using Office Excel

To add or update work items from Office Excel

1. In an Office Excel worksheet, select the cell where the upper-left corner of the work item list should appear.

2. On the Team tab, in the Work Items group, click New List.

3. In the Connect to Team Project dialog box, perform the following steps:

   1. Select the name of the server that contains the team project that you want.

   2. Select the project collection that contains the project that you want.

   3. Select the project that contains the work items that you want to update or add to.

   For more information, see Connect a Microsoft Office Document to Team Foundation Server.

4. In the New List dialog box, perform one of the following actions:

   • Click Query List, click the name of the query that you want to view in the Select a Query list, and then click OK.

     The work items in the query appear in the Office Excel worksheet.

   • Click Input List, and then click OK. On the Team tab, in the Work Items group, click Get Work Items. In the Get Work Items dialog box, specify how you want to find work items.

     For more information, see Find Work Items to Link or Import.

   For more information about working with these different list types, see Flat Lists and Tree Lists, Query Lists and Input Lists.

5. (Optional) Save the worksheet.

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Exporting Work Items from a Query from Team Explorer

To export work items in a query from Team Explorer to Office Excel

1. In Team Explorer, expand the Work Items node, and then locate the saved query that you want to view.

2. Right-click the query, click Open in Microsoft Office, and then click Open in Microsoft Excel.

   Office Excel opens and displays the query results.

3. (Optional) Save the worksheet.

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Exporting Select Work Items from Team Explorer

To export select work items from Team Explorer to Office Excel

1. In Team Explorer, expand the Work Items node, and then locate the saved query that you want to view.

2. Right-click the query, and then click View Results.

3. In the query results, select the work items that you want to open in a new Office Excel work item list.

   To select more than one work item, press the CTRL key and click each work item that you want to include in the list.

4. Right-click one of the selected work items.

5. Click Open Selection in Microsoft Excel.

   You can also click the Office Excel icon in the toolbar to accomplish the same action.

   Office Excel opens and displays the work items that you selected.

6. (Optional) Save the worksheet.

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See Also

Tasks

Find Work Items to Link or Import

Performing Top-Down Planning Using a Tree List of Work Items (In Excel)

Concepts

Working in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project Connected to Team Foundation Server

Managing Work Items Using Microsoft Excel Bound to Team Foundation Server

Change History

Date	History	Reason
April 2011	Added link to topic that address how to publish a work item to Team Foundation.	Information enhancement.