Hi friends 
Just curious: Anyone here using the “Open in Excel” extension in Azure DevOps?
If so, what are you using it for? Just pulling out data or also bulk updates?
It has <https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=blueprint.vsts-open-work-items-in-excel&ssr=false#review-details|such a bad rating in the marketplace> - is it really that unreliable?
why is it necessary to install Visual Studio btw? 
It adds to Excel “Team” in the ribbon which ultimately enables the integration between the two tools
The negativity is mainly due to needing another thing to install which, i imagine for a lot of folks, they need their central IT support team to install
In addition, it can be very intermittent in working successfully
Or at least whenever i use it have found that
You don’t necessarily need visual studio btw, you can get the team foundation plugin
thanks, that makes sense.
it can be very intermittent in working successfully
So does it just error out sometimes and is working again when trying later? Or is it particular glitches?
The former - never could quite figure out why
So i just use the csv export/import approach now
We use it a lot and I’ll say it seems to be a bit temperamental. Some months when Office patches land we’ll get a burst of tickets for it breaking. But it doesn’t break for everyone and helping people get to the list of disabled plug-ins in excel is hard some times.
We have multiple orgs on different Azure tenants and a big server instance and that seems to throw it off sometimes too which takes some trial and error to make it authenticate again.
Users use it for both bulk editing and reviewing in excel. For me the biggest drawback has always been the lack of markup support. Users often want to use it to create a complex template tree ot work items for repeating projects with tables, formatted text etc. and get frustrated when it strips out all of the images and formatting.
I’ve used both the csv export/import and the Excel add-in extensively… the Excel add-in is fantastic IMO… when it’s set up and working properly. I don’t advertise it broadly because it takes a fair amount of training and support to use properly, but it’s awesome at storing/uploading complex backlog templates or working with people that utterly refuse to look at ADO
I haven’t had the team extension break on me ever. I wonder what causes the issues.
I wish I knew - lucky you to have no errors! It is super handy when fully working
