How to Export Work Item Change History in Azure DevOps?

Question

Hi everyone,

As a Project Manager, I often need to share detailed change history of work items with customers to show what updates or requested changes have been made over time.

I’d like to know the best ways to export work item change history from Azure DevOps, ideally in a format that’s easy to present or share with stakeholders.

Could you please suggest the available methods and steps for:

• Power BI – Can we connect to Azure DevOps to extract historical work item changes and visualize them?
• Excel – Is there a way to export the complete change log (not just the current state)?
• Azure DevOps (UI) – Are there any built-in features or extensions to export work item history directly?
• REST API – Can we extract revision history programmatically and convert it into a report?

If there are any recommended tools or best practices for generating customer-facing reports from this data, I’d love to hear about those too.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Hi KIRTIKA MITTAL,

Azure DevOps (UI) – Are there any built-in features or extensions to export work item history directly?

There is no direct option to download the History of the WorkItem.

We have Export to Excel and Microsoft Office 2019 plugin extension to export workitems.

Using Export to Excel:

After Installing the extension.

• Copy the Work Items which you want to export.
• Right click and select Open selected items in Queries.

• Right click on the custom Query items.

You can see different options (History option not available).

Power BI – Can we connect to Azure DevOps to extract historical work item changes and visualize them?

You can create an Analytical view and pull that into Power BI.

This MSDoc clearly says that history can be downloaded using Power BI.

You can create a analytical view using in Devops.

• In PowerBI dashboard => Get Data => click on More

and search with Board and select Azure Devops (Boards only) and click on Connect.

• Provide Org and Project Name.

• After selecting the required data, Navigate to the Table view.

• You can see the History of the Same Work item in multiple rows.

Hope this helps

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