Custom JIRA Report Generation

I am using Atlassian JIRA at work nowadays for tracking of multiple items on our projects including tasks, feature requests, customer questions, requirements and of course bugs in our software. The key question that has come up recently was whether I could easily format the requirement type issues in JIRA so that they can form the body of a Software Requirements Specification (SRS).

At first I thought I would be able to just install a plugin into JIRA's flexible plugin system but quickly found that there were no suitable plugins that would provide the report I required. I did start think about creating my own plugin but that would have taken too long so I turned my attention to the various export formats, which includes, XML, excel and Word. The problem with the word output is that there is no way of customising the output format easily. Then I remembered about words form merge function which allows you to import data from an external data source, which includes an excel spreadsheet. So the end result is I can export the JIRA issues as an excel spreadsheet and then use the Word Merge feature to load this spreadsheet as a data source and import the data into Word using any format that I require.

Links
Atlassian JIRA