Office Connector Limitations and Known Issues
Use this page to troubleshoot any problems you may have with the Office Connector.
Office Connector has several high-impact performance issues. Upgrade Confluence (especially 3.4 and before) to address them:
Confluence Cloud users
Due to changes to our Atlassian Cloud infrastructure, Edit in Office may only work with Internet Explorer 11, or may be temporarily unavailable for your Confluence Cloud site. We'll try to have it up and running again as soon as possible, but can't provide a timeline at this stage. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact our support team .
On this page:
Support and Troubleshooting
If you have a problem, please take a look at the limitations and known issues described below. In particular, check the article Troubleshooting Read-Only problems in the Office Connector.
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:
- Confluence Server Base URL. You can retrieve this by logging in as a Confluence administrator and visiting http://<Confluence Base URL>/admin/viewgeneralconfig.action
- 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.
- Tell us what Office application are you using (eg. Microsoft, Open Office, etc.)
- Confirm if you have Sharepoint Support Service installed. You can investigate this following Microsoft's KB article.
- Tell us what browser is the problem observed (eg. Fire Fox or IE).
- Tell us what Operating System is the problem observed.
- Capture a Fiddler report for tracking read-only issues.
- Attach a copy of the Word document that's affected.
- Include your logs and a cut/paste from Administration >> System Information. We'll be looking for what version you're using along with the application server.
Prerequisites
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 Edit in Office using the Office Connector.
Limitations
Limitations when using a Custom Single Sign-On Solution
If you are using a custom single sign-on (SSO) solution (i.e. an SSO solution other than Crowd), you need to enable 'Allow authentication tokens in the URL path' in the administration console. Read Configuring the Office Connector for instructions on how to do this. Your users will also need to select the 'Remember my login' checkbox when logging in. Note that there is a security risk when enabling the 'Allow authentication tokens in the URL path', hence we recommend that you implement SSL when using this option.
If this does not work, please report your issues here: CONF-19452. Please state what SSO solution you are using.
Custom SSO solutions are not tested against the Office Connector and hence are not supported.
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.
Importing a word file DOC/DOCX with numbering list within a table removes the numbers from that column.
- 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.
- Please make sure Word content visible on every page. Any content that beyond the Word page might cause rendering issue in Word view macro.
- The following text formatting is imported:
- bold
- italic
- superscript
- subscript
- color
- underline
There is not yet support for displaying animations in an embedded PowerPoint document. If you have animation in a slide, the contents of the slide will most likely be displayed overlapping. There is already an open feature request to support this, as a workaround it is recommended to split the animated slide into two or more slides to avoid display issues.
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 ':)'.
Incompatibility with the third-party plugins
On of the third-party plugins, Arsenale Lockpoint, also provides check in/out capability and Lockpoint is fully compatible with the Office Connector.
Before installing an add-on (also called a plugin) into your Confluence site, please check the add-on's information page to see whether it is supported by Atlassian, by another vendor, or not at all. See our guidelines on add-on support.
Firefox Configuration
See Install the Firefox Add-On for the Office Connector.
The Firefox WebDAV plugin, which is required to edit Office documents, can't be used with Firefox 57 (Quantum) or later, as Firefox has ended support for the technology it relies on. If you want to edit Office documents in Firefox you'll need to use Firefox 56 or earlier, or use a different browser.
Getting 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}
Limitation for editing Office files directly from Confluence
- OpenOffice unable to edit file with .xlsx extension
- LibreOffice is not an official supported platform or part of the prerequisites for editing Office files directly from Confluence - so using this application may cause corruption to the Office files.
Limitations when using Basic Authentication over non-SSL connection
Known Issues
List of Unresolved Issues from our Issue Tracker
Below is a list of the open issues for the Office Connector.
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.
From the Confluence project in JIRA:
RELATED TOPICS
Configuring the Office Connector in the Confluence Administration Guide
Take me back to the Confluence documentation