Copying existing documentation into Confluence Cloud

Question

Hi,

We want to move a large Doc proj into Confluence using copy-paste.

Issue: Atlassian tells us, and it has also been our experience: unexpected errors occur when copy-pasting from any source.

I reached back out to Atlassian to inquire as to whether running text through Notepad/Notepad++ would be sufficient as normally either of these would strip any background text, but could not get a confirmation.

Question: Has anyone run a successful copy-paste operation from any source type: PDF, Word, HTML/XML into Confluence server or Cloud? In other words, text formatting worked as expected after the copy-paste?

If not/so: What are the "unexpected errors" that did/you would expect occur.

Out primary concern is that when we go to release to our users, whether we hire an independent consultant to theme/not, that there are no unexpected errors.

Thanks,

Pat

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I've had more success with Server than Cloud, but I've only ever needed to copy small things into Cloud.  Server happily imports very long docs from word in my experience.

Pat D'Ambrosio · Answer

Thanks Nic,

The Word Import function does work, but it is often cleaner to handle smaller sections of text than a say 12 page (or even greater) Word Doc.

? for you:  Does this work better on the server than the Cloud?

The ? for us would be, if we later theme this content, what might happen to any background coding. A number of years ago, different products etc., this came back to bite us.

~Pat

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The content does seem to stumble when a copy/paste contains formatting information that is not in the most simple or generalised format.  But I don't run into problems with simple text from documents where people have not used the advanced functions of the editor, and yes, running something through a plain text editor does almost always drop all the formatting that Confluence doesn't handle.

I find the word import function is far better at pulling data from existing documents than copy and paste.