Export Work Items from Azure DevOps Board to Microsoft Excel

3 min readJan 8, 2023

Manually updating and reporting on work items can be a tedious and time-consuming process. It’s understandable that you would be looking for ways to streamline this task and save yourself time and effort.

Fortunately, the Azure DevOps board in Excel can help with this. By using the Azure DevOps office-integration for Excel, you can view and manage your work items directly from within Microsoft Excel. Once configured, work-items can be easily refreshed and used in excel.

I will be guiding through the process of retrieving all work items,
(This is required only if you feel Export to CSV/ Send as mail doesn't work for you in sending status mails. For eg: Retrieving work items in a parent-child format)

Connect to azure devops board from excel:

Install Azure Devops Office integration:
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#other-family
Start with a blank worksheet in Microsoft Excel (Office Excel 2010 or later version)
Ensure the account signed in Microsoft Excel have access to your Azure DevOps Board
Once the office integration is installed, ‘Team’ tab will be visible

Now for connecting, click on ‘Team’ tab, then choose ‘New List’.
Connect to Azure DevOps Server dialog opens.

Add server Url with organization name, once loaded select your project and connect. If connected ‘New List’ dialog box will be opened. Choose ‘Input List’ and click ok.

Great job now we are connected, and in the new empty list we can add new work items and publish the same.
(For more details on adding work-items:
Modify Azure Boards work items in bulk with Microsoft Excel — Azure Boards | Microsoft Learn)

Retrieve existing work-items from board

Click on ‘Get Work Items’

8Using any of the below mentioned options we can extract the existing work items from board, (Note: Query mentioned here can be created from Board-section in azure DevOps web portal)