Editing an Office Spreadsheet from Confluence

When viewing a wiki page that displays an attached Office document, you can launch your Office editor directly from Confluence. This allows you to edit an Excel spreadsheet from within Confluence and save it back to Confluence.

This is just one of the ways Confluence can interact with Office documents. For an overview of all Office Connector features, please refer to Working with the Office Connector.

Your System Administrator can enable or disable the Office Connector or parts of it. The Office Connector options can appear in different places on your Confluence page, depending on the themes and configuration of your Confluence site. Please refer to Configuring the Office Connector in the Confluence Administration Guide and discuss any configuration problems with your administrator.

On this page:

Prerequisites for Editing an Attached Office Spreadsheet

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The Office Connector allows you to edit:

Office files embedded in a wiki page or from the page's attachments view
The contents of a wiki page in a compatible Office word processor application.

To make use of these editing capabilities, you will need the setup described below.

Browsers

If you are using Firefox, you will need to install a Firefox add-on. Firefox will prompt you to do this, the first time the add-on is required. You will find instructions in Installing the Firefox Add-On for the Office Connector.

Office File Editors

To edit Office files, you will need to have Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or NeoOffice installed. (See the configuration matrix below.)

If you are using Firefox, you can choose which of the above editors you want to use. The Firefox add-on allows you to configure this option for each file type. See Installing the Firefox Add-On for the Office Connector.
If you are using Internet Explorer, you will need Microsoft Office. You cannot edit Office files in OpenOffice when using Internet Explorer.

Configuration Matrix

You need one of the following software combinations to edit Office files from your wiki page:

Operating System	Office Version	Browser
Windows Vista, or Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3	OpenOffice 2.x – 3.x, or Microsoft Office XP, 2003 or 2007	Internet Explorer 6.x – 8.x, or Firefox 2.x – 3.5
Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6	NeoOffice 3.1.1 (Version 3.1.2 of Neo Office does not work. See ¿CONF-18365 for further information). The "Edit in Work" feature is known to work in OpenOffice 3.2.0.	Firefox 2.x – 3.5
Linux	OpenOffice 2.x – 3.x The only known supported Office editor for Linux is OpenOffice. But in theory it should work with any WebDAV-aware application.	Firefox 2.x – 3.5

Editing an Office Spreadsheet in your Office Application

To edit an Office spreadsheet in your Office application,

There are two ways to do this:
- From an Office spreadsheet embedded on a page:
  1. Open a Confluence page with an Office document embedded on it.
  2. Move your mouse pointer to the top of the spreadsheet embedded in the Confluence page, until the hidden title bar appears.
    
    Screenshot: The title bar showing 'spreadsheet.xls' above an embedded Excel spreadsheet
  3. Click the title bar above the embedded spreadsheet.
- From an Office spreadsheet in a list of attachments:
  - If an Office file is attached to a Confluence page, you can edit this file directly in your compatible Office application, in one of the following ways:
    - View the list of attachments for a specific Confluence page, then click the 'Edit' link next to the Office file on the Attachments page. (See Viewing Attachment Details.)
    - View a list of attachments displayed on a page via the Attachments macro, then click the 'Edit' link next to the Office file in the list of attachments. (See Displaying List of Attachments in a Page.)
A window will pop up, asking you to confirm that you want to open this document.

Screenshot: Confirmation window in Firefox

Screenshot: Confirmation window in Internet Explorer
Click 'OK'. Now you may be asked to log in to your Confluence server.

Screenshot: Logging in to Confluence
Enter your Confluence username and password, then click 'OK'.
The Office spreadsheet will open in your Office application.
Make the necessary changes, then save the spreadsheet. It will be saved back into Confluence.

Troubleshooting

Problems? Please refer to our guide to the Office Connector limitations and known issues.

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