Confluence Cloud link to attachment not possible?

[Ronald de Vries]

I'm using Confluence Cloud.

When I want to link some text in the page I am used to clicking on the link icon and then having a choice to link to attached files on the page.

This seems to be gone. All I get is pages I can link to, but no choices to select anything else. What am I missing? I checked the docs and they all say you can select Link > Search etc., but that does not show up in my page in edit mode.

I'm on a Mac and use Chrome latest.

[Dick Weldon]

It's now January 2020 and the feature of linking to an attachment is still not fixed.  This is not an improvement, it is a degradation of what was a good product.  This is not an isolated instance, there are many, many more. At some point the pain will be become too great to use the product.  

[John Douglas]

It's now May 2020 and it's still not fixed.

[Patricia Desmond]

September and still we wait

[Peter]

I am less and less impressed with Atlassian products the longer I use them.

[Marcin Żurawiecki]

UPDATE! December 1st, still nothing. Surprised? Well, I am not. Looks like the new policy of Atlassian is to take more of your money for fewer useful features.

The same topic here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-to-display-file-as-link-in-new-editor/qaq-p/1113801

I feel sorry for the support person (cc: @Shannon S) that tries to make it out of this bad situation. 

Apart from the fact that the new editor lacks this basic functionality that was available in the legacy one, how long does it take to implement it? I am a product owner myself and it doesn't look like an expedition to Mars.

[John McCallum]

I would like to echo the sentiments of the others here. Basic functionality has been degraded! What were you thinking? 

Changes over the past year has made it nearly impossible to generate tidy documentation with imported or linked content. It may be time to give up

[Robert Gottesman]

This is a major annoyance and I would surely hope somebody wakes up.

[Adam Dennis]

I can't believe such basic functionality has been removed. This is really quite annoying!

[Walter Adams]

It is now March 2021 and still no change. I long for the days of the old editor. 

Atlassian used to be a company which delivered a lot of value for a good price. Seems these days this is no longer the case (not just because of this issue).

Time to move on to better products

[Grant Reid]

I'm ready to look at them - any suggestions?

[Walter Adams]

Hi Grant,

Difficult to tell which is the best alterative product. This is highly dependent on the use case for which you use Confluence.

I for one are looking for an on-premise model (which excludes already lots of alternatives) without the need for integration to JIRA etc. My need is also limited to a product for small-scale teams. I'm looking at wiki.js for the moment. It has potential and quite a bit of momentum going for it but it is rough around the edges in terms of WYSIWYG editor. If you're coding in markdown, no issues but WYSIWYG users comparing it to Confluence will not find their full set of what they need.

Good luck in finding what you need,

Walter

[Grant Reid]

Thanks Walter - I'll take a look...

Its hard to know if all the changes of the new editor were an active decision to strip functionality in order to monetise - or simply not well researched.

I used both - WYSIWIG for most content and markup when I needed something a little special.  Creative table formatting for example - or understanding the structure of the html table which I could then get a script to generate - and simply insert the resulting generation.  Many of these features now somehow exist if you buy a plugin that provides functionality that was previously just working.

Why were anchors removed?  Its just a macro plugin - why can't I link to any part of the page I like without first creating a heading, publishing it - finding the heading link, reediting the page - and then finally inserting the copied link from the previously published page.  I can't think of a way to make it less efficient.

It used to be a great product - somehow now if feel like only a good one.

[Deleted user]

November 2021. Still not fixed

[Mark Bearden]

This is one of those issues that makes users feel like Atlassian HATES its customers.  This is such an obvious, simple feature, that (I seem to recall) used to be available in older versions.  (But maybe I'm remembering use of on-premise rather than cloud.)  And thousands of customers clamor for it for years, and Atlassian just HATES us all with their silence and lack of action.  Yeah, this makes me mad, you can tell.  I waste SO much time trying to work around this VERY VERY SIMPLE seeming feature omission.

And this comment is one of those that one would hope would wake someone up at Atlassian and say "Fire! We're going to go into a nosedive as soon as ANY competition comes along, because we've convinced so many of our customers that we despise them."

[Mark Bearden]

Perhaps if anyone is getting a notification of my comment here, more of us could speak up even if we're repeating ourselves?  Or am I violating the terms of service for this feedback channel by suggesting that customers ask more loudly for this feature?  Wouldn't surprise me, given the apparent hatred that Atlassian has for customers.

[Walter Adams]

"Fire! We're going to go into a nosedive as soon as ANY competition comes along..

I have set sail a long time ago leaving Confluence web for the atrocity it is. I've personally gone to Notion which is far more flexible and developed and has JIRA integration if you need it.

The reality of the matter is that a lot of organizations are so large and married to their processes that they can and will not easily move away to some competitor unless everyone important "agrees" on it.

Taking about competition which might make this switch a lot more real for a lot or organizations: have a look at Microsoft's new soon to be lounged 'loops' concept which goes a long way into the direction of Confluence. Added bonus is that it will be present in the Office 365 subscription many users already have as well as integrate in teams, outlook, etc... used by millions in business. The launch of loops is imminent but of course the first version will not cover all. Give it a year or so and Atlassian will start to have a problem with their crappy product set

[Steve Sashihara]

Still not fixed? :(

So there's no easy way to create links to attached files?

[Jawann]

I really wish the new editor had feature parity with the old editor before it was released.

[Abbas Dar]

Can you not do this already on the sever version? Therefore why's it not available on the cloud version? 

What we want is if there is a line of text, I want to be able to do select that line of text, click 'Add Attachment' and the attachment will be hyperlinked to that line of text and attached into the page.

I really thought this existed in the server version!

[Peter Halverson]

Can we get the name(s) of the most senior leader(s) who signed off on changing the editor without first making it feature-complete with the existing one? I'd like to hear their rationale.

[Verena]

I work in documentation where one of the most important principles is "single source" / "reuse". So I neatly sorted all my images on thematic file lists to include them in pages from there, and broke down my texts into small text snippets to include whatever I needed when creating a specific documentation.

Now I can't include pictures from my file lists any more, I can only include images I store in some dropbox (surely I want to set up yet another storage space for documentation resources when I thought I had Confluence for that ...) or have just uploaded recently (which also only leads to a duplication of the upload) - meaning I have to re-upload that to every page where I need it, and god forbid that I ever have to change it.

Plus, I can't justlink to any of my pages at any time like I could so far - I first have to visit it so it appears in the list of pages I can link to. Which makes putting together a documentation that needs to point to specific background information every now and then a very frustrating experience (and my documentation is small compared to what I know about some machine documentation with hundreds of modules ...).

All in all, I get the impression the planning for Confluence has been taken over by the Jira team or some other people from social media, and they think it is just another blog or whatever, and have no idea of how documentation is put together and what the requirements are.

[JP]

Couldn't agree more Verena.

[Saulius Petraitis]

I don't see a reason to be so polite as others. Verena is right about everything. I guess there is some idiot behind this terrible idea to introduce "unusable improvements". Hope he is now fired and can not sleep at the moment. 

[Rui Fraga]

Just found this out today as well. Absolutely unbelieavable.

[dave_drexler]

Just adding a 'plus one' to the many complaints above. Atlassian: you say you're listening, but there's no evidence of that unless you actually DO something with the feedback. The new editor and lots of other UX changes have been awful.

[Kim Hirschman]

Is the restoration of this feature even on the development roadmap?  We need to know whether the Atlassian decision makers are taking the issue seriously. 

[J Fincher]

+1 on wanting this feature back.

[Kirsty Davidson]

This is such a backwards step. I thought I was being stupid not being able to figure out how to 'save as a link' the docs I was dropping on a page. It has taken me 90minutes to figure out how to do this and achieve the result I was hoping for. 

I had 6 docs to drop on, and would've been able to do this in a couple of minutes before, For each one before: 3steps: drag & drop, right click, save as link. When done Publish. Now I think I figured out it took me 12 steps each and some typing and back and forth. Probably a couple of minutes per file.

It absolutely sucks, so much so I've decided to leave the ugly boxes for each file on another page.

Atlassian - get a grip!

[Steve Wilson]

Crazy old game when the latest and 'greatest' is years behind the old tool. First message in this chat is just over 12 months ago. Anyone listening?

Fix linking!

[Zsolt Jacsó]

This is unbelievable.. 

I really hope that some incompetent managers will be fired!

[Paul Dekker]

This is really disappointing, not to be able to link an attachment ... Shame on you Atlassian!

I solved it by copying an "old" page which uses the "old" editing features.

I hope Atlassian will attend this.

[Kevin Ryan]

Today I may have found a workaround -- not as sleek as right clicking the large, garish thumbnail and easily converting it to a link (a convenience lost with Confluence Cloud), but it seems to have worked for me today:  Bring up the Attachments page by clicking ". . ." > Attachments.  This lists all attachments on the page with hyperlinks for each.  Then I can right click my chosen link in the Name column, copy it, return to the Edit screen, type my link text, and assign my copied link to it.  

Looks like other contributors on this page have suggested this, but it does not hurt to suggest it again. 

[Michaelx4g]

It's still not working

[Corey.Hampton]

This is the dumbest functionality ever!!! I need to save my page, go to attachments, get the link for one attachment, go back and edit my page to add the link, then save my page, go back to attachments to get my next link. 

You removed core functionality and never fixed it. 

[Muhammad Akram Sharifi]

This is crazy Still not fixed Nov/11/2021 

[Robert Horan]

Is there a link to a bug fix for this item?

[Lars Dammann]

There is and probably will not be a fix for this huge pile of crap. Atlassian doesn't care, as long as da money comes rollin' in, baby, yeah...

So first we have been forced to migrate to Atlassian Cloud, just to learn that key concepts which we used in Confluence do not work any longer. This effectively costs me so much effort and the company it costs money - great move, Atlassian, great move! But probably there is a 500 bucks/month addon somewhere out there to fix this.

[Mr. Wilson]

This seems a little crazy. Overall the new look and feel of the editor is pretty terrible but I can get by with the ugly tables and overall lack of formatting options however this is by far the worst I've found so far. T-T

[Kiran Mistry]

I found this by accident today.  I was importing a  MSWord document to make into a page. Which was all OK.  I then wanted to insert a document into the page just created.  The "Insert files and images" menu was different to the standard one but it did the job.  After that it inserted the document which came up as an icon and then by clicking on the icon it also offered me to view as a link.  So what I did next was to import a blank MSWord document (with minimal text - just a title) so as to make a page and then inserted my file as mentioned above.

Seems to work.!

[Jawann]

This works because the Word import results in a page based on the old editor. You can achieve the same thing by copying an existing page based on the old editor or choosing the old editor from the list of templates (assuming it's available in your site). If Legacy editor page is not available in your site, you should be able to enable it by talking with your admin or contacting support. See here for details about new vs. old editor: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/Change-to-your-content-is-in-your-hands/ba-p/1324476. I use the old editor exclusively and don't foresee that changing any time soon.

[Kiran Mistry]

I don't have the legacy editor but will make a request to support. Many Thanks for the info. 

[Julie]

Should be straight-forward but isn't. I faked it out. 

How to link an attachment in Conflluence

Click the … to add the attachment

Copy the .url from the attachment

Open the page to edit it.

Click the link attachment (or cntl-K) and add whatever it’s defaulting to (will edit the link after)

Right click to edit the link, paste the .url from the attachment and enter.

Right click again to edit the link, and change the name of it to whatever you want.

[Kim Hirschman]

Me too.  By the way: here is what popped up when I clicked on the link icon in this comment box (so Atlassian still recognizes that this is what people are expecting)

[Diego]

Hello there!

Currently, Confluence Cloud has been relaying a new editor called the Fabric Editor.

The documentation points to the previous editor, TinyMCE. You can check more information about our new editing experience here!

Confluence Editing Improvements

Try out the new editing experience

The new editing experience: we're listening Edited

We do have an issue reported here:

CONFCLOUD-65640 | Cannot add link to image in Fabric Editor

We can still workaround this by uploading the files using this procedure:

1. Enter Edit mode
2. Click File & Images icon in the toolbar
3. Upload your file / Select from recently uploaded
4. Publish the page

Also, we can use the Attachment Macro and show the attachments on the current page.

Let us know if this helps you out Ron! Looking forward to your reply.

[marcel]

Funny how a post about missing features is answered with a link to 'Confluence Editing Improvements'.

I have been using Confluence for a few months and it seems like every week I find myself searching for a feature I'm sure was there before but has gone missing for some reason (linking to attachments, linking to undefined pages et cetera).

With these features missing or becoming less intuitive, working in Confluence is slowly becoming a cumbersome experience...

[Brian Carlsen]

The problem with the workaround is visually it creates this ugly block tile to represent the file and there's no way to change the view of that.

If what you want is just a link (with whatever text you want) to the attachment:

A better workaround, which is pretty annoying is to save the page, use the 3 dots in the upper right corner to go to the "attachments" area.  Upload your attachment, then right-click on that and obtain the actual link to that attachment.  Then go back and edit your page, highlight the text where you want a link, click the link and paste in the copied URL for the attachment.

And just for the record, I agree that this Fabric Editor is a significant downgrade in the ease of using confluence. It also won't let you create a child page in an inline way like you used to be able to do by typing [

[Jeff Pannone (BA)]

I agree with  Brian C above. This is one of many drawbacks to the new fabric editor. The learning curve from old to new is steep and in many cases core features that improved efficiency are removed/non-existent.

[Ian Vowles]

I suffered the same problem and found myself here looking for the easy way. Then went to find my own way round it. What I ended up doing was publishing my page as was (link not going where I wanted it), going to the attachments page via the elipses on the page, and taking a copy of the file location link (right click in Firefox and select copy link location). Once back in edit mode on the page I pasted the https:// stuff I had got on the clipboard, and once published it behaved like the old version, asking me if I wanted to download my attached file. Certainly not the ease of use I had hoped for in a new version. I am much more interested in fast and easy over pretty and complicated.

[JP]

I agree with Brian and Jeff - the new editor is so frustrating and a significant downgrade from the old one.  The dumb way we now have to work around to get a link to an attachment is crazy.  It seems like dumb-and-simple is the new design pragma. At the very least, if you want to hide the complicated stuff, just put a  "advanced" option under the ellipsis menu and put all the tough stuff under there.

I'm paying for Confluence and I moved my company to it because I wanted features. If pretty UI was my primary need, I would have gone with Notion. You (Confluence) folks need to decide who you are designing your software for and increasingly that does not seem to be other software developers.

[Andreas Neumann]

I have the same impression as others here on this page - Confluence is getting worse and worse. Attaching files and putting links to them on the page was heavily used in my company, please give us back this functionality!

[Andreas Neumann]

Here is another workaround: create a new page by copying an old one, then Atlassian allows you to work with the old "editing experience"

[Marc Pflieger]

I get iterative development... but I have not experienced this bad of a downgrade in ease of use in a long time.  This is like the New Gen projects, which are seriously lacking. cmon

[Yu Li]

This doesn't work, Diego.

My team attach PDF files to the wiki pages and use the built-in PDF viewer for review and commenting, a great tool to collaborate on the PDF files. Now with the workaround you suggested, we have no way to get to that built-in PDF viewer. If I just insert the link to the attachment, or use the Attachments macro to show the list of attachments to the page, people clicking on the link just download the PDF locally, no way to collaborate online anymore. This is a serious step backwards and completely breaks our doc review workflow. What can we do to fix it?

Funny thing is that the function still works with pages created in the past. If I edit them and try to insert a link, I get the good old dialog that allows me to link to an attachment, and PDF viewer function works as the result. But we just cannot get any newly create page to work the same way. So for now we workaround this by always make a copy from an old page. But man that is stupid, and I am never sure how long this will keep working. You guys may decide to kill off the workaround anytime with this kind of decision making.

[Bernd Seufert]

Still the same problem for me in February 2020. Sad, so sad...

[Scott Morris]

This is killing me. 

[Jeremy Shinn]

It's really terrible that I can't upload an attachment and just have it linked without jumping through a bunch of hoops.  The big block that it creates when you attach a file is not something that I would EVER want it to do...