Excerpt and Excerpt Include Macros - Need to know Where They're Used

[Tia Nelson]

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.

[Logi Helgu]

Interesting idea and might be really helpful to have this option <3

Until (or if ;) then you should be able to get info on this if you are an admin: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-check-for-macros-addon-usage-in-confluence-cloud-1229032839.html 

[Curt Holley]

Hi @Tia Nelson 
Welcome to the community!

That is a great suggestion. It would indeed be a helpful feature.

May I suggest that you send this feedback directly to Atlassian, via Give feedback in the Help section of Confluence.

[Tia Nelson]

On this page? Insert the excerpt macro | Confluence Cloud | Atlassian Support

I noticed some pages in Confluence have "give feedback about this feature" links and some don't. This one didn't. But the help page has a give feedback about this topic link, I assumed it was for feedback on the documentation, not the feature.