[Status: Not planned] Exporting Comments Entered on a Task or Subtask

Hi John, thank you for posting this question here! You're right, at the moment comments aren't included in Excel exports, since they're part of an activity stream which includes several types of updates. Including all of these updates from several tasks in one file could make it overwhelming, but there is a way to export comments and updates from individual items by printing them. Another option is to copy relevant comments and points to the description field before exporting the Project. I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any other questions! :)

It would be very useful to think of an export of comments related to task.

Maybe with a structure of this kind:

TASK | COMMENT 1 DATE  | COMMENT 2 DATE | 

name | comment 1 .....        | comment 2.....         |

thank you

Hi Alessandro, thanks for sharing this! I really appreciate the visual representation of this idea, I think it's really interesting.

Hi everyone! I'm moving this post to the Product Feedback section of the Community so that other users can more easily find it to +1 the suggestion. 

actually the export column should list all or recent 5 comments in one column instead of multiple columns and should only contain comments posted only by a user.

|Comments|

user1[1st Jan]: comment 1

user2[2nd Jan]: comment 2

I believe the export of comments is very important when it comes to task updates and specially ability to monitor progress and see comments/updates that an Asignee was posting for his/her tasks. If we have comments and date/time stamp exported in excel we can see how much progress has been made and what has been done week by week, if we are reporting a progress on weekly basis.

I created a custom field called Last Update which I can then export to excel, but that unfortunately did not help. Each week when an Assignee want to add the latest update to the task (using this Last Update custom field), it needs to overwrite the previous Last update, and there is no date stamp, so we lose previous updates, which defeats the purpose.

'Add Comment' is great way to see progress and it has time stamp, but without a functionality to be able to export those comments it is almost impossible to create any project update reports directly from Wrike.

Just adding my vote (in addition to the + on the first comment). I'm the Wrike administrator/coordinator for my company of ~120 people.

I need to move a large amount of data (over 1,000 tasks) to a new workflow and change assigness, but want to keep the original format as well as hardcopy/back up. I thought I'd be able to export/import an excel of all the existing tasks and make my workflow/assignee changes there - but neither the attachments or comments would transfer. So then I thought, okay no problem I'll just duplicate the tasks because I know it'll keep the attachments that way...but again, I lose the comments.

So now I'm stuck and can't make the change to the department without losing the existing structure (in case they decide to go back to it). I have to tell them that I need to overwrite all the tasks and make the workflow/assignee changes there. Given it's taken +5 months to get this department to have faith in Wrike in the first place, they're not going to be very keen on this!

Please make the export (or at least duplication!) of comments possible. Thank you.

I would also like to add my two cents here to adding this functionality to the system. As my company develops processes and procedures for possible audits within the confines of a project management system, we have come to the conclusion that the best way to track work is with comments. Wrike currently offers the ability to report on and export comments in Timelog Reports, but only comments that have a time entry included. Any comments added at the bottom of a task are ignored by this report and comments are not an available field in any other report type. As for the Project Stream view, I find it odd that I can view the comments and other activity in the stream but when I go to export it, those comments and activities are nowhere to be seen. I feel like offering a download of the data from this view and to not include what is being seen within that view is somewhat misleading. 

Right now my team is still developing our project management structure for Wrike so we are able to adapt to the system before getting into it, but I could see how companies that have been using Wrike for years could be very frustrated to find out that there is no way for them to report on or export their comments. The only way around this I can see right now is to always log time with any comment that you wish to be able to report on/export and then create a Timelog Report to generate this information. 

To the Wrike Development Team: Please allow for comments to be a field that can be included in reports or some other practical method of exporting them. Thank you! 

My company needed to migrate to a new Wrike account and needed to fully export its data to the new account.  We were not able to get the attachments or comments to transfer over, however, which severely limits our abilities and audit trail.  Please add an option to export attachments and comments as needed for seamless data migration.  

Hi guys, I've bumped this with our Product Team to see if there has been any movement.

As I understand this undertaken has an effect on various functions in Wrike so is a large undertaken so it may take a while to simple investigate and plan.

I'll drop back here when I have more specifics 👍

there is no effective way to monitor comments unless it is tasked, especially if same platforms covers several projects. of course it is possible to copy paste it.

simplifying comments follow up through task option probably will make monitoring easier

i would find this very useful as i need to export numerous tasks monthly and manually enter in the comments.  it is very time consuming and allows for human error.  

We would also very much appreciate the possibility to export comments and/or to have the possibility to include comments in reports! We hope that this issue will be approached soon!

We too would find the addition of this feature extremely helpful for auditing and governance purposes.

Could you please provide an update on whether this feature is likely to be added soon?

When using Wrike for several different tasks, we would like the ability to export the latest comment (with name and timestamp) to a report so that a manager of multiple users can see the tasks and updates of all of his or her reports at one time. 

As a work-around, we have created a custom field, but there are two problems with this:  (1) there is no timestamp in the custom field, so the manager has no way of telling how fresh the update is, and (2) any revision to the custom field requires deletion of the previous update, which means that there is no record of updates to the project.

As a super-manual solution, it is possible to type updates in a custom field and copy-paste them to the comments stream, but this rework will not be accepted by our user-base.

Please either allow the last comment in the comments field to be reported or add a custom field with similar functionality (timestamp, all updates to the field saved in the task) so that managers can view all of their teams' updates without manually opening each individual task and also see all updates when clicking into the task for more detail.  The color selection button is great, but frequentl, a manager needs to know the specific detail about an important project and the update field allows this type of information.

will there ever be the functionality to have all comments available to export with no manual work?

Agree with previous responses.

Wrike need to enable Export comments into a Excel. Seeing only Task status is not sufficient (at least for my projects) 

Any progress update from the Wrike Development team? 😀

When I first bought in...I did a quick sample export and saw that the framework was there and assumed basic export, perhaps with filtering was a given. I had been using OneERP, etc which allows absolutely everything to export and then its up to the user to filter what they want in excel etc. We do R&D and as part of that, we must keep project diaries and frameworks for auditing; comments are more than sufficient. So for the last 12 months we have been busy. Now is time for audit and I find out that we cant actually do such a basic (function for user) export. I dont really care how big the file is...excel is a big boy and can handle reasonable levels of data.

Im pretty shocked actually...this is a deal breaker for us. Auditing projects with granularity is a basic function for anyone seriously using project management tools. Could you please advise where this is up to? Without this...the last 12 months using wrike have been a waste of time and as the manager, I am not spending resources for someone to fish out all the comments. Very disappointed.

Forgot...btw we have over 10 support calls and emails to get a trial of the time tracking feature and still havent had anything sorted. How does one actually get support in Australia. We did get one call back who said they would get it organised but have heard nothing for a couple of months now...

Posted here out of frustration.

The export, including comments needs to also report the creation date, not the start date for auditing purposes. Am I right in that this important audit information is also not available or am I missing something?

Thanks

This would be extremely useful for us.

Hi everyone! First of all, thank you for your support for the suggestion here, it now has 60+ upvotes! As promised, I've checked with the Product team to add a status here, and for now, the idea is not planned by them. I understand this is disappointing, but your feedback hasn't gone unnoticed - it is now included in the reports and the team is keeping a close eye here, more overall info on how some of our processes work is here: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360019106654--Read-Me-What-happens-with-Product-Feedback-

Thank you again for your inputs here! I'll let you know if there's a status change. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Adding a +1 from me here. Often the back and forth chat in a Wrike task has some useful stuff to use for official documentation, but doesn't really stand on its own as a good archival tool. To be able to export it all, including inline images, would make documentation a bit easier!

Adding a +1. This would be incredibly useful for my team.

I would add my 2 cents.  We need to be able to access comments in hard copy after we close a file. 

Thank you for adding your support here Barry Horne, I've passed on your feedback to our Product team 👍🏼

The inability to export comments is becoming a deal-breaker. The point is, it's my data, I need to get to it. Suggestion for the export mechanism: have an option to export to XML which can allow you to include each comment and any of its relevant metadata for each task node. It could then be parsed by the end user, for example, using SQL (Xquery).

You'd have to be sure to encode the raw content properly for XML entities (&, <, >) but otherwise how you decide to structure it is arbitrary...I would be happy with anything really just as long as I can see all my comments are there.

Hi Hayley Propsner, thanks for taking the time to post here and share your insight, we've passed this on to the team. 

At the moment, there are no plans for this, but we do appreciate the feedback and if there are any changes to that in the future, we'll be sure to update this thread. You can read more about how we work with Product feedback on the Community in this post. 

I'm sorry to hear this is becoming an issue for you, if you'd like to speak to your Wrike representative about this, please do let me know and I'll be happy to arrange this 👍

Also, welcome to the Community 🙂

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Elaine Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover