I'm a technical writer helping some parts of our company to add their Confluence documentation to our external web site. Of course, I'm very used to using what I call "snippets", which is re-useable chunks of text or images or whatever.
In Confluence I've created a page that I use to house multiple excerpts, which I use in other topics to avoid having to re-write the same thing over and over again. Some of these excerpts are included in some templates, and therefore end up in many, many Confluence pages across each site.
When I'm managing a project in RoboHelp or Flare, I have the ability to see which topics I've used a snippet in, so that I know which topics will be affected if I edit that snippet. With excerpts, on a Confluence page using the excerptinclude macro, I of course know which page the excerpt is coming from because I have to enter it to add the excerpt, but on the excerpt macro, I cannot see what pages are using that macro. This feature would be extremely helpful, letting me know if it's safe to delete an excerpt, letting me check to ensure that the new text for the excerpt macro will work in all the pages where the macro resides and if I need to create a new excerpt or not based on that.
This will help the most with documents that multiple people are editing. If someone tries to edit the text from the excerpt, they will see that the excerpt is used in multiple places, which will prompt them to check those pages to ensure that the new text they're trying to add to the macro is correct for those pages as well.
Currently there's no warning that tells me that an excerpt is actually in use on another page. Any user can delete my excerpts and I may not even notice ever. This feature would, in my estimation, greatly improve the usability of excerpts.
