formatho is a native macOS app for reading Azure DevOps work items and getting them out of the browser in a form you can actually paste somewhere.
If you write status reports, you know the problem. The work item lives in Azure DevOps, the report lives in an email or a document, and moving one to the other means a browser tab, a lot of scrolling, and a copy-paste that arrives as a wall of unformatted text. formatho exists to make that a single action.
Work items, formatted for wherever you are pasting them
Find a work item and copy it to the clipboard already formatted — the ID, the title, the state and the link, laid out so it lands correctly in an email, a document or a chat message rather than as raw text you then have to tidy.
That is the whole point of the app, and it is the thing you will use fifty times a week. Everything else is in service of finding the right item quickly.
Exporting work items, without a spreadsheet
If you arrived looking to export Azure DevOps work items, it is worth being exact about what formatho gives you: formatted rich text on the clipboard, not a file. Paste it into Word, Outlook, Teams or a document and it arrives with the ID, the title, the state and a working link, already laid out.
It does not produce a CSV or an Excel workbook. If what you need is work items as spreadsheet rows to sort, pivot and total, Azure DevOps’ own query view exports to CSV and that is the right tool for it — use it and keep formatho for the other job.
That distinction is the whole design. Most export tooling assumes the destination is a cell. Most status reporting needs a sentence, with links that survive the paste and formatting that does not have to be repaired afterwards.
Queries, graphs and hierarchies
Your saved Azure DevOps queries run inside formatho, so the filtered views you already built are the ones you work from. Recent activity is a click away for the items you touched today.
For anything with structure, formatho draws it: work items as a hierarchical tree so you can see what sits under an epic, and as a graph so you can see how items link to each other. You can also build your own custom lists of work items to keep a set of tickets to hand without turning them into a query.
Read-only, on purpose
formatho does not edit anything. The personal access token it asks for needs Read access and nothing more, which means the worst case if that token leaks is that someone can see what you can see — not change your board, not close your tickets, not delete your work.
That is a deliberate trade. A tool you reach for every day to read and format things does not need write access, and giving it write access would make the token a much more dangerous thing to keep on a laptop. If you want to change a work item, Azure DevOps is one click away.
Private by design
formatho talks to your Azure DevOps organisation and to nothing else. There is no formatho account, no red8.io server in the middle, and no analytics — your work items are fetched straight from Microsoft to your Mac, and the formatting happens there.
Your access token and settings are stored on your own Mac, inside the app’s sandbox. Keeping the token read-only is the main thing that limits what it could ever be used for, which is why the app is built that way rather than asking for more scope than it needs. The full detail is in the formatho privacy policy.
What you need, and what it costs
formatho is free on the Mac App Store and needs macOS 13 or later, plus an Azure DevOps personal access token with Read access to work items. There is no paid tier and no subscription.
Setting the token up takes a couple of minutes, and the formatho FAQ walks through exactly which scopes to tick and what to do when a token expires.
More about formatho
- formatho FAQ — tokens, scopes, saved queries and what to do when something stops working.
- formatho support — a real inbox, not a form.
- formatho privacy policy — what the app touches, and what it never sends.
