A cautionary tale: Confluence to Word to Confluence

[Patrick O_Connell]

Hello,

Just writing this in the hopes that it'll help someone to avoid the same experience.

A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to create a great big table, for the status of all pages descending from a certain one. The children display macro was the obvious starting point.

I was uncertain if I wanted the end product of this to be in Word or Confluence, but I needed at least to do text-to-table in Word. Child display macro output = column 1. This would have 6 columns, in the end, but those others could be added in Confluence. Or not.

And right here is where I went wrong. Instead of copying in Confluence and pasting to Word, I apparently exported from Confluence, because I just tested this and was able to reproduce what happened. (I think I was concerned about too large an amount of data in the paste buffer).

And I didn't realize this had happened, for all links to in-wiki pages. Fictionalized example:

http://wiki.abc.co/display/XYZ/efgh

became

file://jkl1-abc.co/display/XYZ/efgh

Then copied and pasted back into Confluence. And I've only realized now, about two weeks later, that those file:// links don't work. I have a broken in-wiki link for every row of that table, and there are many rows. Find-and-replace doesn't find the "file://." I've got some work ahead of me.

Under the general heading of...
https://imgflip.com/i/397nzz

Pat O'Connell
Technical Writer
MindGeek Montreal

[Bill Bailey]

Well you need the confluence-source-editor. THis will allow you to edit the actual source of the page, and then use Regex (If you need to ), to find all the fill:// instances and replace with https://. Boom! In five minutes, your problem is solved.

The source editor is essential when working with content brought in from Word, to clean out a lot of junk that comes in.