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Use this page to troubleshoot any problems you may have with the Office Connector.

On this page:

Support and Troubleshooting

If you have a problem, please take a look at the limitations and known issues described below. If you do not find a solution to your problem, please help us to troubleshoot the issue by providing the following prior to submitting a support request on the Atlassian Support System:

  1. Confluence Server Base URL. You can retrieve this by logging in as a Confluence administrator and visiting http://<Confluence Base URL>/admin/viewgeneralconfig.action
  2. Run Confluence's generic error page by visiting http://<Confluence Base URL>/500page.jsp and give us the result for review. Please copy the whole page including the list of enabled plugins.
  3. Tell us what Office application are you using (eg. Microsoft, Open Office, etc.)
  4. Confirm if you have Sharepoint Support Service installed. You can investigate this following Microsoft's KB article.
  5. Tell us what browser is the problem observed (eg. Fire Fox or IE).

Prerequisites

(info) Your System Administrator can enable or disable the Office Connector or parts of it. The Office Connector options can appear in different places on your Confluence page, depending on the themes and configuration of your Confluence site. Please refer to Configuring the Office Connector in the Confluence Administration Guide and discuss any configuration problems with your administrator.

Please refer to Office Connector Prerequisites.

Limitations

Limitations when Importing Office Documents

The formatting of the imported content is constrained by the capabilities of HTML and Confluence's wiki text. You may need to manually fix some complex formatting after the import. Features of Word that will be imported:

  • Tables will be imported but cell/row merging will be removed. Also, nested tables will be flattened to one table.
  • Lists will be imported. Multi-level lists are supported. Paragraph breaks between list items will restart the list numbering in Confluence. All list numbering is converted to Confluence's list numbering (1.,2.,3.,4.,...). All list bullets will be converted to Confluence's bullet character.
  • Heading styled text is imported as headings in Confluence. Other paragraph formatting is not supported. This includes indentation, space before, space after, and text alignment.
  • The following text formatting is imported:
    • bold
    • italic
    • superscript
    • subscript
    • color
    • underline
Limitations when Editing an Office Document

When converting a wiki page to an Office document, the Office Connector does not attempt to convert:

  • Macros — The macro will appear original form with curly brackets, such as '{children}'.
  • Wiki links to other pages — External links and bookmark links will appear on the same page.
  • Emoticons — Smileys and other emoticons will appear as their plain text equivalent, such as ':)'.

Known Issues

Troubleshooting and Specific Known Issues

Error appears when attempting to import, display or edit Microsoft Office 2007 documents.

Microsoft Office 2007 file formats are not supported. (See reported issue WORDDV-101)

Pages are not saved back to Confluence after editing in Word.

Ensure that your Confluence server's base URL is set correctly. (Check it by going to the 'General Configuration' screen in the Confluence Administration Console, as described in Configuring the Server Base URL.) When a user edits a wiki page in Word and then uploads the page back to the Confluence server, the base URL determines where the document will be saved. If the base URL is incorrect, the documents may be saved to a different Confluence server.

Special characters in page names cause an error.

Special characters in page names cause an error when attempting to edit the document in Office. (See reported issue WORDDV-153.)

I get the error 'Unable to create an ActiveX object to open the document. This is most likely because of the security settings for your browser.'

First, try lowering the security settings in your browser. Namely, you want ActiveX controls to be enabled. The default security settings should be fine. You may see this error if you have changed them from the default settings.

If that doesn't work, there may be a configuration problem with the SharePoint client controls. The Office Connector uses these for the integration between IE and Office. Follow the steps outlined in this article to fix the problem.

Errors occur when the Office Connector is running behind IIS

This issue is currently being tracked as WORDDV-130.

The Attachment Checkout plugin is not compatible with the Office Connector.

The Attachment Checkout plugin is not compatible. Please ask your System Administrator to disable the Attachment Checkout plugin.

Read-only problems: When I try to edit an attachment displayed with the {viewfile} macro, it always opens in Microsoft Office as read-only.

This is caused by a bug in the WebDAV plugin versions 1.2.1 and later. To fix the problem, you will need to revert to version 1.2 of the WebDAV plugin. A System Administrator can do this by uninstalling the WebDAV plugin and then downloading and installing the following plugin jar:
http://svn.atlassian.com/svn/public/contrib/confluence/webdav-plugin/jars/webdav-plugin-1.2.0.jar

Read-only problems: When attempting to edit in Word, the page opens up as read-only in Word 2007 and I am running Windows Vista.

You can work around this problem by installing a web folders update from Microsoft and setting Word 2007 to run in Windows XP Compatibility mode. You can download the web folders update here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=17C36612-632E-4C04-9382-987622ED1D64

Then follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to your Office installation directory. (Default is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12.)
  2. Right click on 'WinWord.exe' and select 'Properties' in the dropdown menu.
  3. Select the 'Compatibility' tab in the Properties dialog.
  4. Select the option titled 'Run this Program in Compatibility Mode'.
  5. Choose Windows XP from the dropdown menu.
Read-only problems: When attempting to edit in Word, the page opens in read-only mode. None of the above 'read-only' cases apply.

This usually means there is something interfering with the WebDAV conversation that needs to happen between Confluence and Microsoft Office. This could be caused by a Single Sign On (SSO) solutions like CAS or Siteminder, incorrect server configuration, custom Confluence authenticators, or corporate proxy/firewall servers. Please check your WebDAV. If that does not work, let us know what may be interfering with WebDAV when filing a support issue on our Support Site.

How do I get the Office Connector to work in Firefox?

See Installing the Firefox Add-On for the Office Connector.

How do I get the Office Connector user interface to show up in Adaptavist's Builder theme?

See Adaptavist's documentation on Integrating WordDAV or Office Connector .

The following will work in Builder 2:
Use the following wiki text to add the 'Doc Import' menu item to a menu of your choosing:

{menulink:webui|location=system.page|key=importworditem}Doc Import{menulink}

We have also created a macro for the builder theme called {editinwordlink}. This macro allows you to add the Edit-in-Word button to the Title area of the page (or somewhere else). For example, the title panel of your builder theme with the {editinwordlink}
macro could look like this:

{builder-pagetitle}
{builder-show:context=page,blogpost|mode=view}{table:cellspacing=0|cellpadding=0|border=0|width=100%
|class=pageEditInfoOptions}{table-row}{table-cell}Added by {page-info:created-user},
last edited by {page-info:modified-user} on {page-info:modified-date}{builder-labels}{table-cell}
{table-cell:align=right|class=greyLinks}{*}{editinwordlink}{*}{builder-favicon}{builder-watchicon}
{table-cell}{table-row}{table}
{builder-show}
The text in a PowerPoint presentation looks very different when I use the {viewfile} macro

You may have created your presentation on Windows with Microsoft-specific fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, etc). If you are running Confluence and the Office Connector on a non-Windows server, the fonts will not exist when the preview is created and a substitute font will be used to render the text. If you want the preview to match the original as closely as possible you will have to install the missing fonts onto your server.

The easiest way to do this is to copy the True Type font file (extenstion .ttf) for any missing fonts to your $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/fonts directory on the server running Confluence and the Office Connector.

When copying fonts from a computer running Windows, the font files will typically be located in c:\windows\fonts. You can also download the Microsoft Core fonts from sourceforge.

The text in an image from a spreadsheet or document looks very different when I do a document import or use the {viewfile} macro

See the answer to the previous question.

When I try to install the plugin from the Plugin Repository, I get an 'Object Error' message.

This is most likely due to a packet size limitation on MySQL. Set the max packet size and restart the database.

Why does the Office Connector ask me to enter my password?

You will be prompted for a username and password unless you are using browser cookies to store credentials. Usually, if you select "Remember me" when logging in, this will solve the problem.

List of Unresolved Issues from our Issue Tracker

Below is a list of the open issues for the Office Connector, drawn from the Atlassian issue tracker.

  • Before reporting a bug or requesting a new feature, please take a look to see if it has already been reported.
  • If you find a likely-looking issue, click the link to find more information and possible workarounds.
RELATED TOPICS

Working with the Office Connector

Configuring the Office Connector in the Confluence Administration Guide

Take me back to Confluence User Guide