Editing and saving Office files
Asked by SallyD:

I'm using Confluence 4.1.3 and Firefox 11.

I used the Excel macro to display several rows of an attached Excel spreadsheet. I have an Edit Document link/button at the top, left of the displayed rows on the page. When I click that link, nothing happens. I have to go to the Attachment page to edit the doc. I did try this from IE and, of course, it works. From what I've read in other topics here, I'm guessing you arent' too suprised that I'm having problems editing from Firefox. However, if there is a fix that I've missed, I would be thrilled to hear it.

While searching for an answer to this problem, I came across a topic that said the user could edit the Office file and auto-save back to the wiki. Oh, I want that!! :-) If someone could tell me how to set that up, I would be a VERY happy person!

We are new to Confluence and a frightening number of employees are new to wiki. Telling them to navigate to the attachment page, open the doc, save to their desktop, and then reattach the file is not going over well at all! This would be a huge step in user adoption!

Thank you

Sally


Answers:
author: SallyD
body: It's taken lots of back and forth with Support, but it looks like we got it. Initially, I think it was not clear that not only was this not workiing in Firefox, it was not working in IE either. Took a few emails to get to the common goal to get editing and saving working with IE8. We did two things: Upgraded to Office 10 and set the Offic Connector option to "Allow authentication tokens in the URL path." This seems to have done the trick. I wonder simply setting that Connector option alone would have solved the problem, but I was forced to upgrade Office before we got to the Connector. I do know that upgrading alone did not fix things. We are still working on some oddities in opening attached xlsx and xsl files from a hypertext link on a page. However, as it stands now, I can edit and save a file from the Edit in Office link on the Attachments page and through the viewfile macros that Bob mentioned. I can do this in both IE8 and Firefox 11. I hope this helps someone else.


author: Bob Swift (personal)
body: I think you are talking about the viewfile macro. Also, attachments macro can put attachment list on the page.

comments: author: SallyD
body: I don't see anything in the Insert menu or the Insert -\> Other Macros menu called viewfile. And, adding the attachment list to the page is nice to know and eliminates one step oin the process, it does not eliminate the two steps that are the real problem for my users.

Sorry, Bob, but my question still stands: Is it possible to edit an Office file attached to a wiki page and save directly back to the wiki?

Sally


author: Bob Swift (personal)
body: <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/View+File+Macro>


author: SallyD
body: First of all, Bob, thank you very much for taking the time to respond to this post. I do appreciate it. You got me off on the right track, I think...onto a new track, at least.

The page you referenced I have already done. However, that page got me back to Editing an Office Document in Confluence (<http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Editing+an+Office+Document+from+Confluence>). That page confirmed it should do what I want and Firefox 11 is not listed as a supported browser.

IE is not working as described either. As I mentioned in the original post, opening the document works fine in IE. However, when I try to save the change, it says it is a read-only file. So, as I said, I have to save to my desktop and reimport to Confluence.

I also found [http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Troubleshooting+Read-Only+problems+in+the+Office+Connector](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Troubleshooting+Read-Only+problems+in+the+Office+Connector.), which has me off on a possible culprit. Our Confluence server is hosted. Maybe there's something in that config that is causing the problem.


Tags: ms-office

ms-office-connector

webdav