Export Change Impact Heatmap data to Excel

Who this is for: Change managers, analysts and PMO teams who want to analyse change impact data in Excel or BI tools.

You can export the data behind the Change Impact Heatmap to XLS. Use it for executive reporting, impact audits, combining impacts with data from other systems, keeping snapshots, or building your own dashboards.

Open the report

Click Reports in the left menu.

Choose Change impacts.

Set up and generate

Choose your time scale (weekly, monthly or quarterly). Monthly is recommended. Don't compare exports made with different time scales (see How it is calculated below).

Set the start date and end date.

Add any filters, such as portfolio, hashtags, initiative type or initiative status. The labels may differ in your organisation.

Open Options and turn on Show values if it isn't already on. Aggregate impacts must be on for values to show; it turns on automatically when needed.

Click Generate report.

Check that number values show in the heatmap cells before you export.

Read the report

There are two XLS downloads.

Heatmap values

The grid of values as you see it on screen.

Each cell is either a weighted impact score or a count of changes using the dominance rule, depending on how your organisation has set up ChangePlan. Ask your ChangePlan admin which one you use.

Full underlying data

One row per audience, per impact, per time period. This is the best file for analysis, pivot tables and sharing.

Each impacted audience has its own row, with no comma-separated groups.

If an impact has a date range that crosses several time periods, it gets one row for each period. For example, this impact runs from 20 August 2025 to 4 September 2025:

In the weekly time scale, that range spans three columns:

So a weekly export shows the impact as three rows:

Columns in the full data export

Column	What it holds
Audience	Org groups show the full path, for example `Corporate Finance > Audit > Compliance`
Impact level	Low, Medium or High
Weighting	Only for organisations using the weighted impact logic
Start date	Defaults to the initiative's target go-live date unless a different date was set. Format YYYY-MM-DD
End date	Defaults to the initiative's target go-live date unless a different date was set. Format YYYY-MM-DD
Type	Change type, chosen from a dropdown
Change	What is changing
Impact	How the change affects this audience
As-is state	Current state
To-be state	Future state
Initiative	Initiative name
Portfolio	Portfolio name, if there is one
Hashtags	Separated by commas
Initiative type	If set

If an impact's start and end dates are empty, the export uses the initiative's dates. The export covers your chosen date range and filters, and follows the time scale of the heatmap you generated.

How it is calculated

ChangePlan pulls together the impacts from each initiative in the report (only those that match your filters) for each impacted audience. It applies your organisation's weighting for Low, Medium and High impacts, totals the score for each audience in each time period, and uses your organisation's settings to colour the cell.

Why time scales give different totals

When you generate the heatmap, you choose a weekly, monthly or quarterly time scale.

When someone adds an impact on an initiative, they choose when it affects the audience:

The default is At go-live, the initiative's target go-live date. They can switch to Choose dates and set a start and end date for each group.

In this example the impact affects the audience from 20 August 2025 to 4 September 2025, a period of 15 days. Each time scale splits that period differently:

Weekly: each column is a 7-day block.

Monthly: each column is a calendar month.

Quarterly: each column is a 3-month block.

If an impact's date range spans several columns, its score is applied to each column separately.

Monthly time scale (2 columns):

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Total weighted impacts: 16+16+30+30 = 92

Weekly time scale (3 columns):

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Total weighted impacts: 16+16+16+30+30+30 = 138

What this means for your export:

One impact can appear in several rows, once per time period it spans.

Longer date ranges appear in more columns and give higher totals when you add them up.

The same data exported with different time scales gives different row counts and totals, even with identical filters.

Weekly is the most likely to inflate totals, monthly is recommended, and quarterly is the least likely to inflate totals.

Don't compare exports across time scales. Weekly, monthly and quarterly views are not designed to be compared directly.

For more on scoring, see Impact heatmap 'Weighted Impact Score' logic.

Options

Show values: must be on to export heatmap values.

Aggregate impacts: must be on for values to show; it turns on automatically when needed.

Show activity burden hours: can't be used together with values, and isn't included in the XLS export. Turn it off before exporting.

Export

Click the Export icon in the top-right corner.

The export window opens.

Choose XLS (heatmap values) or XLS (full data).

Click Download. The file can take a few minutes. When it's ready, download it from Alerts (bell icon).

Numbers may look like text in Excel. The values are correct; format the cells as Number if you need to.

If nothing shows

The heatmap values file is empty: you exported before generating the report with values showing. Turn on Show values, click Generate report, check the numbers appear, then export again.