Download, edit, upload?
Asked by Rich Pixley:

I need to make a number of changes to a page that would be trivial to do in my text editor, no matter what intermediate format were used.  

Is there an easy way to download a confluence page, edit it, then upload it back to replace the original? I know a number of other similar tools have this functionality but I'm not finding it in confluence.


Answers:
author: Anne Saunders
body: When I want to make changes, I typically edit right there in the page.  

Under the ellipsis menu in the upper right for a page, you can export the page to Word or PDF, if you have the right editors for those. You'll still have to Select all, copy, and paste to put it back into Confluence, though.  

If you're using something else (Google Docs, Pages, OpenOffice, etc), you can also:

1. Select to edit the page in Confluence
2. Copy the page text in Confluence
3. Paste it into the editor of your choice
4. Make your changes
5. Copy the content of the document
6. Paste it back into the Confluence page and publish.

Behaviors of things like images and tables can vary a little in this process, so I prefer to manage the whole thing in Confluence - it gives you a WYSIWYG experience instead of a "Now I have to resize and align all these images" experience.

comments: author: Rich Pixley
body: I would expect that to work for simple text.  

I'm looking at adding 206 anchors. I don't see how I would do that and then cut/paste it back into confluence.  

If there were a simple export/import markup, or the like, then I could export, emacs, keyboard macro, run, import, done.  

The "in the app" approach is literally going to take hours one anchor at a \<zzzz\>.


author: Anne Saunders
body: Are you lucky enough that your anchors are all to content headings? In that case, each one has its own URL anyway and you don't need to muck around with Anchors - and even imported text with enforced heading hierarchy will have them when pasted. You're still stuck making the actual links, but it's less terribad.  

Unfortunately, the nature of anchors in Confluence is sufficiently different from the nature of bookmarks in Google Sheets and Word that they don't play nicely when copied out.   

They APPEAR to work at first when pasted in, but unfortunately, the links still point to the document bookmarks, rather than creating anchors in Confluence. (Making this approach a no go, especially for anyone without access to your Google Workspace or O365 instance.)  


author: Anne Saunders
body: AAAAND once I knew you were looking for Anchors and markdown, it got easier to find you an answer! [Confluence wiki markup syntax](https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-confluence-wiki-markup/)


author: Rich Pixley
body: "**Note:** the new editor doesn't support markup."  

Thank you for trying. Yes, markup would solve my problem today.  

I *think* the long term solution for me will be that I stop using confluence as a document editor. Anything more than a paragraph or two will need to be done in some other document format and linked to.  

Confluence can still be used for trivial documents and for indexing and organizing content but it simply isn't up for much more.


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud