Imported Word document becomes a single pag how to split by headings and restore cross-reference.

[ani_asatryan]

Hi everyone,

I recently imported a Word document (.docx) into Confluence, but the entire document was converted into a single page instead of a structured multi-page space.

I'm looking for help with three things:

1. Split into multiple pages — Is there a way to break the imported page into multiple pages automatically or manually?
2. Split by heading levels — Ideally, I'd like the pages to be organized hierarchically, with parent and child pages based on heading levels (e.g., Heading 1 → parent page, Heading 2 → child page, and so on).
3. Restore cross-references — In the original Word document, I had internal cross-references (e.g., "See Section 3.2") that worked correctly. After the import, these are broken. Is there a way to restore or recreate them as working links in Confluence?

Any advice, workarounds, or recommended tools/apps would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Barbara Szczesniak · Accepted solution]

@ani_asatryan This is the way that importing a Word doc works in Confluence Cloud—you import in the context of creating a page, so it creates a single page. 

Although, according to this page https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/import-content-into-confluence-cloud/, you can import up to 30 docs in a go and:

Each file imported will be its own Confluence page or live doc. When you import more than one file at a time, they are added as child items under a restricted placeholder page or live doc (titled “Imported pages” with the date and time information). This means you can privately review the imported content, then organize it and set appropriate permissions.

To solve number 1 and 2, you can do one of the following:

• break the Word doc up into separate .docx files before importing, then import 30 at a time (I guess if you happen to use Master Documents in Word—I looked it up and that's still a thing you can do—you would be all set)
• create the pages in the structure you want and copy/paste the text you want on each page from the Word document

With regard to the cross-references, I don't see anything about Confluence knowing/doing anything about them when you import. I tried copy/pasting from a Word document where I used hyperlinks to another place in the document, rather than cross references. (I just use this method; you can try pasting your cross-reference text and see what happens.) In the hyperlink case, the text is pasted as a link in blue underlined text—there is no actual defined link though, just formatting to let me know where the link is supposed to be. Once I would have all the content in the separate pages in Confluence, I would need to update all of those links to point to either the new correct page in Confluence or a heading within a new page in Confluence.

Maybe someone else knows of an easier way to do this or a Marketplace app that would work. (Sadly, it seems that it's possible to split by headings into separate pages in Data Center, but not Cloud. https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/import-a-word-document-into-confluence-170493136.html.)

[Marc -Devoteam- · Accepted solution]

Hi @ani_asatryan 

Yes, see this community article on this topic.

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-articles/Workaround-to-import-Word-documents-and-split-by-heading/ba-p/2475070 

But still cross references are not kept I think as this configuration is different in Work and Conlfeunce.

Or you could look at this app

[ani_asatryan]

Thank you for the suggestions! I do have the Word importer, and the article was helpful to some extent but unfortunately it doesn't fully solve my problem.

Here's my situation: the document is quite large (100+ pages) with multiple levels of subheadings. The main issue is that Confluence only allows me to import 30 pages at a time, so each import creates a separate, disconnected set of pages. This makes it really difficult to maintain the proper parent-child page hierarchy across the entire document.

Do you know if there is a way to either increase that import limit, or perhaps a workaround to merge and restructure the pages into a single organized hierarchy after importing in batches?

[Marc -Devoteam-]

Hi @ani_asatryan 

No there are no options to increase limits, as these are set by Atlassian on the API.