Importing Word Docs - numbered lists not ported properly
Asked by Mary Jo Dockman:

Use Confluence 5.1.2. When importing .doc or .docx using Tools\>Import Word Document, the numbered lists will import as all 1s throughout the document. Since our documents can be quite lengthly and renumbering all affected areas time consuming and redundant, is there a solution to this problem or will there be a solution in an upcoming release? Thanks.


Answers:
author: Mary Jo Dockman
body: closing this question since it appears there isn't a way for Confluence to handle the problem.


author: Mary Jo Dockman
body: Based on the fact that this question has not been answered, it appears that Confluence does not accurately handle procedural numbering imports from Word. Hopefully this will be a feature added to a future release of Confluence as I'm sure I'm not the only user who wants to import procedural documentation into Confluence. It's unfortunatel that The lack of this feature has prevented me from using Confluence for user documentation.


author: agupte
body: The workaround is to publish the word doc to a pdf, then copy-paste the pdf contents to the confluence doc text.

Note that the copied text in confluence is not pre-formatted with the numbered listing. Eg. Hitting enter after "45. Get user feedback" will not create a numbered line item starting with "46. ". All the number line headers are plain text.


author: Zorba Conlen
body: Similar problem for non numeric bullets. Like this type:

* category 1
* category 2
  * sub category

The bullets come in but indenting is pretty messed up and no way to correct it that I can find.


author: LIU HON PONG PAUL
body: Is this still not sorted? We are using Confluence 6.6.3 and importing a numbered list in a word doc results in "1. 1. 1. ..."

comments: author: LIU HON PONG PAUL
body: Same here.....


author: Mary Jo Dockman
body: trying to close this question...


author: jacabral
body: I spent a full day reorganizing an imported Word document to fix the numbered list issue. I also have html help files targeted for Confluence, which I'm not sure how to handle at this point, as importing html files is non-existant.


author: jacabral
body: I'm using Word 2010 and have the same issue.


author: Mary Jo Dockman
body: I'm talking about procedure steps and sub-steps, for example. They come over in varying ways, often of which is all 1s. And when you try to renumber them or add sub-bullets or sub-steps, everything goes haywire. Confluence seems fair if you're entering content directly into their editor, but not so fine when you're importing from Word. And yet MANY of our contributors don't use Confluence so they're providing lengthy content documents (with steps or bullets or tables, etc) in Word. This makes using Confluence too much work/rework. I heard that Word 2010 is seamless now importing to Confluence, but I'd like confirmation on that. ALthough, in my company, we are required to use Word 2007 at this point. But I'd still like to know about Word 2010. Thanks!!


author: Josch Bencke
body: do you mean numbered lists as in "bulletlists" or as in "chapters" ? The latter, I would not rely on. After importing into the wiki, the fate of these references is sealed - because you suddenly will change hierarchies and pagesequence and pageorganization, splitting and unifying ....   

If you need the crossreferences, I would advise developing a script for the commandline interface or use Notebpad++ and Webdav-Interface to do a global "search-and-replace" on xml sourcecode level, converting the word-references into wiki pagelinks \[wiki page title#wikipagetitle-headingtitle\]