I was recently tasked with updating around 250 alarms, mostly changing the priority but also adding new alarms where a previous alarm didn't exist. I was not able to easily do this with the tools available in 8.1, I am able to export the tags in .xml and open with excel, but this breaks the file for importing due to not having the appropriate .xsd schema file. If Inductive Automation would make the official .xsd available, this could be imported into Excel and then we could use excel to edit the .xml file in a nice table format and import back into Ignition.

I ended up having to use a long complicated python script to convert the xml to xlsx file, make my edits, then use another script to transform back to importable .xml. I understand that some Excel functionality is coming in 8.3.5 but we are a long way off from upgrading, so having the excel schema file could be a nice tool for those who are not ready to upgrade when that feature is available.