Import Open Office documents into Confluence?

Question

We have numerous manuals created with Open Office writer. Trying to open in Word makes a mess of the formatting, the contents table and hyperlinks, the styles and most critically the tables and images go haywire.

We would like to migrate to a better authoring environment. Will Confluence import Open Office docs?

Simon

Justin Justin7 · Answer

Simon:

1) Save your OpenOffice files out as Word docs (from inside OpenOffice)

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOoAuthors_User_Manual/Getting_Started/Saving_a_document

2) Once you have those files in a Word format, use Confluence's Office Connector to import.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Importing+a+Word+Document+into+Confluence

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As another alternative, if you want to have a mix, AppFusions' Confluence integrations with Alfresco, Box, Dropbox allow you to natively open and edit in OpenOffice natively, from inside Confluence. You can embed the docs into a Confluence page, and there is also cross-system search as well, Pre-requisite is that you need to store your OpenOffice files in one of those repositories.Here's some videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj3RRvf1WrpdQCzgqkO9CjUZyipY1z-EY

Jonathan Simonoff · Answer

I don't think there's any straight-forward way to do that.  Were I you, I would try using the Word import function and see how the results are.  (Can you save from Open Office into .doc or .docx format? If not, you might not be able to do the import.)

FWIW, in my experience going from one tool to another is never as straight-forward as it seems like it should be, and there are a lot of differences between the storage format and document structure of an HTML-based wiki and a tool like Open Office writer.

You might consider hiring one of the many Confluence consultants with expertise in conversions.  It might be possible to construct a tool chain using some translators and UWC and get reasonable results.  I suspect that whatever your document structure is, you will have a hard time finding any pre-existing solutions that would really work.