Exporting

Grindstone can hand what your views show to other programs: as an Excel workbook, as CSV files, or through the clipboard. This topic covers Export to Excel, Export CSV for views and Table charts, and Copy and Copy with Headers.

Exports and copies of a view show its entries as you see them: in your column order and sorting, with your parameter values. To change what comes out, change the view first; see Views.

Export to Excel

1. Open the main menu and choose Export to Excel.
2. Check the views you want. Each checked view becomes a sheet of the workbook. The views are grouped as they are in the views panel, and checking a folder checks everything in it. Your user views start out checked.
3. Click Export. While Grindstone builds the workbook, you can click Cancel to stop.
4. Choose where to save the file. Its name starts out as your workspace’s name.

The dialog tells you how many sheets the workbook will have, and Export stays unavailable until at least one view is checked.

What’s in the workbook

• Sheets: one per checked view, in the order the dialog lists them, each named after its view. Characters Excel doesn’t allow in sheet names are left out, long names are shortened, and a name that’s already taken gets a number, such as “(2)”.
• Header row: the column names, in bold, frozen in place, with Excel’s filter buttons.
• Rows: every entry the view shows, not only the page you were looking at.
• Columns: widened to fit what they hold, up to a maximum width.

Values keep their type, so Excel can sort, filter and add them up:

If a view has more rows or columns than an Excel worksheet can hold, the export stops with an error naming the view.

Export CSV

CSV is a plain text format nearly every spreadsheet and database program can read.

From a view

Select a view and click Export CSV in its toolbar, then choose where to save the file. It’s named after the view.

The file has a header row of column names, then a line for every entry the view shows, on every page. It’s UTF-8 text with commas between values, written so it reads the same anywhere:

• Dates and times are written in ISO 8601 form, with their offset from UTC.
• Time spans are written as hours, minutes and seconds, as in 1:30:00.
• Numbers use a period for the decimal point and no thousands separators.
• Yes-or-no values are written as TRUE or FALSE.

From a Table chart

When a view’s chart is a Table, the chart’s toolbar has its own Export CSV (see Charts). A Table chart pinned to the Dashboard offers Export CSV in its tile’s menu (see The Dashboard). Either way, the file is named after the view with “Chart” on the end.

The file follows the table: a column for each grouping, a row for each group, and a final Total row. If the chart is split into series, there’s a column for each series and a Total column; otherwise there’s one column for the measure. See Charts.

Copy and Copy with Headers

To copy rows from a view, select them, right-click, and choose Copy or Copy with Headers. You can also press Ctrl+C to copy, or Ctrl+Shift+C to copy with headers (see Keyboard shortcuts). Copy with Headers puts a line of column names first.

To copy a whole view without opening it, right-click it in the views panel and choose Copy or Copy with Headers.

Grindstone tells you how many entries it copied. What’s on the clipboard pastes into Excel or another spreadsheet as a table, one row per entry:

• Dates and times are in your time zone, as in 2026-03-04 09:30:00.
• Time spans are hours, minutes and seconds, as in 1:30:00.
• Numbers are written the way your computer’s regional settings write them.
• People, work items and other things appear as their labels, from the first column of their Selection view (see Views).
• Values a formula couldn’t work out appear as #N/A.
• Text that a spreadsheet might mistake for a number, date or formula is marked so it pastes as text.