When viewing a wiki page that displays an attached Office document, you can launch your Office editor directly from Confluence. This allows you to edit a Word document from within Confluence and save it back to Confluence.

This is just one of the ways Confluence can interact with Office documents. For an overview of all Office Connector features, please refer to Working with the Office Connector.

 (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.

Prerequisites for Editing an Attached Office Document

The Office Connector allows you to edit Office files embedded in a wiki page or from the page's attachments view.

To make use of these editing capabilities, you will need the setup described below.

Browsers
  • The WebDAV plugin 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. Earlier versions of Firefox should still work with the Firefox Add-On for the Office Connector.
  • Note: No Chrome support. Chrome does not support WEBDAV clients, so this feature will not work. Please refer to this issue for more information: CONF-23322.
Office editors

To edit Office files, you will need to have Microsoft Office or OpenOffice installed. (See the configuration matrix below.)

  • If you are using Firefox, you can choose which of the above editors you want to use. The Firefox add-on allows you to configure this option for each file type. See Installing the Firefox Add-On for the Office Connector.
  • If you are using Internet Explorer, you will need Microsoft Office. You cannot edit Office files in OpenOffice when using Internet Explorer.
Configuration matrix

You need one of the following software combinations to edit Office files from your wiki page:

Operating System

Office Version

Browser

  • Windows 7,
  • Windows Vista, or
  • Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3
  • OpenOffice 2.x – 3.x, or
  • Microsoft Office XP, 2003, 2007 or 2010
  • Internet Explorer 8.x – 9.x, or
  • Firefox 56 or earlier
  • Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6
  • Firefox 56 or earlier
  • Linux
  • OpenOffice 2.x – 3.x
    The only known supported Office editor for Linux is OpenOffice. But in theory it should work with any WebDAV-aware application.
  • Firefox 56 or earlier

On this page:

Related pages:

Editing an Office Document in your Office Application

To edit an Office document in your Office application:

  1. There are two ways to do this:

    • From an Office document embedded on a page:
      1. Go to a Confluence page with an Office document embedded on it.
      2. Choose Edit Document above the embedded document.

        Screenshot: Page with an embedded Word document showing the 'Edit Document' link 
         

         
    • From an Office document in a list of attachments:
      • If an Office file is attached to a Confluence page, you can edit this file directly in your compatible Office application, in one of the following ways:
        • View the list of attachments for a specific Confluence page, then click Edit in Office next to the Office file on the Attachments page. (See Viewing Attachment Details.)
        • View a list of attachments displayed on a page via the Attachments macro, then click Edit in Office next to the Office file in the list of attachments. (See Displaying a List of Attachments.)

         
         
          
  2. A window will pop up, asking you to confirm that you want to open this document.

    Screenshot: Confirmation window in Firefox



    Screenshot: Confirmation window in Internet Explorer

     
     
  3. Click 'OK'. Now you may be asked to log in to your Confluence server.
  4. Enter your Confluence username and password, then choose 'OK'.
  5. The Office document will open in your Office application.
  6. Make the necessary changes, then save the document. It will be saved back into Confluence.

Troubleshooting

Problems? Please refer to our guide to the Office Connector limitations and known issues.

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