Is it possible to view history in MS Excel ?
We want to use the comment/history field for adding release note descriptions, so that when the product is released, we can extract the release notes for all fixed bugs.
The first step would be to get the history in Excel, the second step would be to filter for comments with Release Note information (don't know how yet)

Or is there any other workaround to accomplish this functionality ?

Hello,

In V1 we don't support viewing history field in Excel.

One workaround for what you are trying to achieve would be to have Release Note in existing "Description" field or you can add a new field to store Release notes (Additional information about how to add a new field available here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404866.aspx). You can prefix all the release notes with "Release Notes:" text.

Now you can add the field into excel listobject and have a custom filter to show only work items which contains "Release notes:".

Hope this helps,

Regards,

One after thought on this,

If you put your Release Note information in the Description field, in-between a delimiter of your choosing, you can use Excel to extract just your release note. For simplicity, say you choose "@" as your delimiter and have a work item query that returns two columns, (ID & Description) open in Excel.

Leave the first column to the right of your query blank, then:

in column D, paste: =FIND("@",B3)

in column E, paste: =FIND("@",B3,D3+1)

and in column F, paste =MID(B1,(D3+1),(E3-D3-1))

Column F will hold your release note description.

Thanks,