Google Sheets

Use the Google Sheets integration to create custom analytics and dashboards for your company.

Overview

The Google Sheets integration creates a Google Sheet with your workspace's issue data. It updates hourly and is often used for building out custom analytics.

Configure

Go to the Google Sheets integration settings and connect Linear to a Google account. This will automatically create a Google Sheet called Linear Issues in your Google Drive.

This is a workspace setting, so you can only connect one account per team. To share the data with teammates, update permissions directly on the sheet.If you're looking for a one-time download, you can export a CSV instead.

Basics

Export data

The following data will show up on the Google Sheet. Each issue will be represented by a row. The first column is the issue ID, then each data type will be listed under a separate column.

Issue details:

• Issue ID
• Team
• Issue title
• Issue description
• Created timestamp
• Last updated timestamp
• Parent issue ID (if sub-issue)

Issue properties:

• Creator
• Assignee
• Labels
• Due Date
• Status
• Estimate
• Priority

If the issue is associated with a Project:

• Project

If the issue is associated with a Cycle:

• Cycle name
• Cycle number
• Cycle start timestamp
• Cycle end timestamp

Timestamp when issue was moved to workflow categories:

• Started
• Completed
• Canceled
• Archived

Since you can have multiple workflow statuses in a single category (e.g. In Progress and In Review fall under Started.), the timestamp exported reflects when the issue was first moved to that category.

Refresh data

The data refreshes every hour if there is an update to be made, otherwise it won't run.

To run an immediate update, open your command line and type *Google* to find the Update Google Sheets data command. Alternatively, go to the integration page and click the update now button.

Avoid updating the source sheet as any changes will be overridden. Create analytics in separate sheets. You can rename the sheet without affecting the data or uploads.

Custom analytics

To build analytics from the data, import or reference data from the sheet Linear created using IMPORTRANGE, VLOOKUP or similar functions.

Linear users have used the Google integration to build analytics that:

• Track velocity per team member.
• Track issues added mid-cycle to see how often this happens and how it affects performance and percentage cycle completion.
• Combine with Linear's cycle statistics to get a deeper view into individual and team velocity.
• Track the types of work completed and planned. To do this, create custom labels and workflow states in Linear. A common way to do this is to name labels with a prefix or key:value pair for easier filtering (e.g. comp: feature_name or type: feature/bug/etc.)
• Build a Gantt chart for planning or other charts and graphs to show issue progress over time.
• Track bugs more granularly. What percent of open issues are bugs? How many bugs were worked on in a cycle compared to features?
• Track time: Use the timestamp data to measure how long issues remain open or how long it takes an issue to go from start to completion.

For more advanced queries or to build dashboards in your app, consider using the API or Zapier.

FAQ