Insert multiple excerpts from the same page

Hi Atlassian Community,

My name is Sekajipo Taplah, and I am a Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team. We are constantly listening to your feedback and improving our products to deliver a more valuable experience.

We are excited to announce that we are making the single sourcing of your content more flexible and useful by giving you the ability to create a page that contains multiple Excerpt macros. 

Previously when you added multiple Excerpt macros to a page, only the first one could be referenced on other pages. However, you can now create a page that contains multiple Excerpt macros, AND you can choose which Excerpt you include on other pages by referencing its name.

How can I use multiple Excerpt macros? 

Let's say, you have several legal statements that you need to include in the Confluence pages you publish. You can create one page with each of those legal statements inside their own named Excerpt macro, like Statement one, Statement two, and Statement three.

Whenever you want to include the text from Statement one on other pages, you insert an Excerpt include macro on all the pages where that statement needs to appear. You set up the macro to point to the source page and reference the name given to the macro. If and when the legal statements change, you don’t need to go to every page and edit the content. You go to the source page and edit it once. Thanks to the macros you put in place, the changes made to the source update all the places where you added the Excerpt include macros.

How does this work?

When you see the need to reuse content, you’ll need to:

  1. Insert an Excerpt macro to the page. The content that you want to reuse gets added inside the body of the macro.
    💡 Macros can be found and added to the page using a shortcut like the slash command or by selecting the in the toolbar and inserting it that way.

  2. Give the excerpt a name in the right panel so that you can find that exact content later. This name doesn’t show up to viewers of the page, so it can be a shorthand name that makes sense to you.

  3. Insert additional Excerpt macros as needed.Unknown.png

  4. Publish the page that contains the macros whose content can be reused elsewhere.
  5. Create a new page.

  6. Insert an Excerpt include macro; this macro will pull in the content from the page you pick and Excerpt macro with the name you enter. You can select Preview before saving the macro to make sure you see what you expect. Excerpt Macros are case sensitive so make sure there's an exact match for your names

  7. Select Save to add the macro to your page.

Unknown 3.png

This feature isn’t necessary for all Confluence users, but for those of us who need to create and maintain a lot of content, having a single source for the content that you reuse on multiple pages is much more efficient and accurate.

Feedback or Questions

Don’t forget to let us know any feedback or questions you have in the comments. We’d love to hear your suggestions on how we can make this experience even better for you!

🎉  Special thanks to our talented engineer Niraj Agarwal for bringing this feature to life! 😀

52 comments

Kythera of Anevern October 27, 2021

HUZZAH!!

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cnaumann October 27, 2021

Thanks. However, this didn't work for me. I tried to include two excerpts named "dog" and "cat" and I got this error.

Parker Higgins October 27, 2021

Woohoo!! Finally very excited for this. 

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cnaumann October 27, 2021

I got an error but I cannot show it as it's proprietary.

Sekajipo Taplah
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 27, 2021

Hi @cnaumann ! Hope all is well!


The feature is case sensitive so double check if its spelled exactly "dog" on the excerpt macro. "Dog" (capitalized) or other variations will not display your content as intended 

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Helena October 27, 2021

When will this be available for Server/Data Center users?

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Matt Reiner _K15t_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
October 28, 2021

Well this is very exciting!

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Therese Hedberg October 28, 2021

Please please please give Data Center this feature as well! 

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Chris Kurker October 28, 2021

Thank you. This is a powerful feature.

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Kevin Dolhay November 8, 2021

I noticed when adding the "excerpt include" to a different page I needed to know the actual source page and then lookup the name of the excerpt macro on the page.  Is there a way to see a list of all the Excerpt Macro's by confluence page somewhere so you can more easily see what is in use?

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Lars Mählmann November 8, 2021

Hurray

Martin Sauter November 8, 2021

So the user has to remember the Excerpt Name? How about listing all excerpts from the Page Containing the Excerpt and let the user choose one? This is not very user friendly.

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Peter Bakker November 8, 2021

When I changed de Excerpt. The excerpts on the other pages didn't change automatically. I had to publish the pages before the change appeared on the page. 

Sven Westgaard November 8, 2021

Nice feature! Bur when I try to use bullets or other formatting a scrollbar appears. Seems it only works on text with basic formatting.

Edited: I have tested again and no scrollbars appear. Seems the problem has been fixed :)

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Jaime.Valentin November 9, 2021

Article has a misspelling. It should say, "How can I use multiple Excerpt macros?" not "How can I use multiple Except macros?"

:)

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balint.pap November 9, 2021

It's a great news, thank you! :) 

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Cynthia Brind Amour November 9, 2021

Been waiting so long for this!!!!

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Joshua Smith November 9, 2021

This is a killer feature, will it be available on the Server version soon?

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Responsable Calidad November 9, 2021

I loved that! Thanks!!! It is very useful. I was expecting something like this, better "summary pages" with this functionality and... I already tried it! Thanks again @Niraj Agarwal  and @Sekajipo Taplah

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Dyego Mota November 9, 2021

is posible include a excerpt in a Jira description or text field?

Paul Jones November 9, 2021

This is a great feature and one we have been using as a paid plug-in. Can this tool be used to edit the existing multi excerpt include plug-in?

S_ Francoeur November 9, 2021

After a quick check, I see that, similar to the Page Properties macro, the new Name parameter is optional.

I do have a few questions @Sekajipo Taplah :

  1. Is there a easy/convenient migration path from the MultiExcerpt Marketplace app for those of us who have been paying for years waiting for Atlassian to release this (most welcome!) improvement?
  2. Will the Excerpt Include macro work (at last) if referencing an Excerpt  within the same page?

Thank you.

PS: Now I really wish the page name displayed in the Surrounding Panel would be –optionnaly– clickable.  Please vote for CONFCLOUD-73160 Make the page name displayed in the Surrounding Panel of the Excerpt Include macro optionnaly clickable.

Andres de Vivanco November 9, 2021

Amazing!  I've been talking about this feature and waiting eagerly till it came out.  Can't wait to try it.  I'm so happy Atlassian is always thinking ahead in the right direction. 

Excerpts in SSOT:  of course. It's not only going to make the content creation easier but it will also make the Knowledge Transfer User Experience (KTUX) much continuous and fluent like @Responsable Calidad mentions above kind of "Summary Pages" combining Excerpts and content .   

Great job Atlassian!! You're always right on pace with what we need or even moving faster.  That's awesome. 

I can't wait to try cascading or hierarchies of Excerpt macros as in cascading summaries but with content (hopefully you can invoke them at different levels of a space and from different levels of the same space  @Sekajipo Taplah).  Thanks!

Cheers,

Andy

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Bowen Loo November 9, 2021

Please add this for Server licence users; I've purchased a plugin just to perform this function. 

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Tobias Maierhofer November 9, 2021

This is a great feature that adds a lot more possibilities.

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