Office Excel Macro

Add the Office Excel macro to a page to display the contents of an Excel spreadsheet.

This is great for situations where you need more than a basic Confluence table can provide, such as for financial information or planning data. 

This macro embeds your spreadsheet in the page, rather than showing a simple preview. People viewing the page don't need Excel installed to be able to see the spreadsheet. 

On this page:

Screenshot: a page with an Office Excel macro displaying an Excel spreadsheet.


There are other ways to add a spreadsheet to your page:

  • Insert the file directly into the page. We'll display a PDF thumbnail of the sheet. This is okay for simple spreadsheets but may not be suitable for complex or multi-sheet files.
  • Use the Widget Connector Macro to embed a Google Sheet.

Add this macro to your page

To add the Office Excel macro to a page:

  1. Upload the Excel file to your page, then publish the page. See Upload Files to learn how to do this. 
  2. From the editor toolbar, choose Insert > Other Macros.
  3. Choose Office Excel from the Confluence content category.
  4. Select the attached file you want to display. 
  5. Choose Insert

You can then publish your page to see the macro in action. 

Screenshot: configuring the Office Excel macro in the macro browser. 

Edit the attached file

If you have Excel installed, you can edit the attached file, and automatically re-upload the file back to Confluence. 

See Edit Files for more information on the ways to do this. 

Change the macro parameters

Macro parameters are used to change the behaviour of a macro.

To change the macro parameters:

  1. In the editor, click the macro placeholder and choose Edit.
  2. Update the parameters as required then choose Insert.

Here's a list of the parameters available in this macro. 

Parameter

Default

Description

Page Name

The page which contains the macro

Enter a page name, if you wish to display a document which is attached to another Confluence page.


File Name

none

The file name of the Office or PDF document to be displayed. The document must be attached to a page on your Confluence site.

If the file does not appear, publish the page, then head back into the editor and try again.

Show Grid?

true

Select to show grid lines around each cell of the Excel spreadsheet. Clear to hide these grid lines.

Worksheet Name

Last worksheet viewed in the spreadsheet

The name of the worksheet that you want displayed.

Last Row

Last row with content

The number of the last row you want displayed, starting from '0' as the first row.

Last Column

Last column with content

The number of the last column you want displayed, starting from '0' as the first column.

Hint for reducing the size of the spreadsheet: Use the Last Column and Last Row parameters to reduce the size of the spreadsheet displayed on the wiki page. This is especially useful to prevent the display from showing empty cells. This will also help to prevent 'out of memory' errors.

Where the parameter name used in Confluence storage format or wikimarkup is different to the label used in the macro browser, it will be listed below in brackets (example).

Limitations

The Office file must be attached to the current page, or another Confluence page. The macro can't display live Office 365 files. If you use Office 365, you'll need to download the file, and then upload it to Confluence to display it with this macro. Alternatively, you could just link to the Office 365 file. 

If your uploaded file does not appear in the File Name menu in the macro browser, you'll need to publish the page, and then hit Edit to return to the editor. 

Rendering very large or complex files can put a lot of load on Confluence. For this reason, in Confluence Data Center we'll prompt you to download the file if we can't display with a set time limit. This limit varies depending on system properties set by your administrator, but is generally about 30 seconds. You can continue to view other content on the page while we attempt to display the file contents. 

Other ways to add this macro

Add this macro as you type

Type followed by the start of the macro name, to see a list of macros. 

Add this macro using wiki markup

This is useful when you want to add a macro outside the editor, for example as custom content in the sidebar, header or footer of a space.

Macro name: viewxls

Macro body: None.

{viewxls:col=5|page=Docs|name=My document.xls|grid=false|sheet=mysheet|row=5}
Last modified on Feb 21, 2023

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