We use these file display macros a lot, especially for Excel.

would be a big regression for us, if they are disabled

Why can't we have both?

Also, I agree that the ability to select a single Excel worksheet to display absolutely needs to be fixed. We have pages that automatically update based on a Excel file's worksheets and those pages have now been left useless.

Don't take away the most useful tool in my toolbox, please.

Also, please fix the ability to select worksheet, and column/row ranges - these were the "magic in the wand", and their loss has hobbled some (a lot) of the usefulness of this tool.

No excuses, please, just put it back the way it was.

Perhaps we need a feature request named "Do Not remove the view file macros". I 100% agree that the current replacement is not adequate, especially for Excel files.

Please do not remove this feature

We extensively use the viewfile macro with confluence. It'll be very disappointing to see this feature removed/unsupported. 

Just adding one more to the list.  I too beleive the ViewFile macro is really more useful for Excel at least.  Please do not remove this feature!

@Sophia Yip, you can actually use "Edit in Office" from within the View File function. But I agree it's still much more of a hassle this way, I want to be able to directly Edit in Office from within the page.

Just started using Confluence over the last couple of months at a new job (I'm historically a SharePoint or WIKI type user) and have now created a fair amount of pages/content utilizing the Office Excel macro in particular for dashboard publishing purposes. I only discovered today that these Office view file macros are to be deprecated.  Having found this ticket thread in my search for some answers or an explanation I figured I should create an Atlassian account and do my part to pile on my objections to this plan as well.

Good question, Bill !!!

Is there any way to specify the Worksheet you want to view in the View File replacement?

I create a spreadsheet of all my control variables for a product. They are split into  tabs to organize what functions they control. With the excel macro I was able to choose which worksheet was displayed. 

I do not see how the View File is anywhere close to a functional replacement if it cannot deal with WorkSheets

I love Confluence and introduced it into my extremely stodgy company.  Adoption is slow but steady as more people "see the light" every day.  We are now a 500 user licensed shop.  However I will not let this become a black mark on my record by upgrading to a version that deprecates this very popular feature. And as I stated before I will no longer need to pay my annual maintenance fee at that point.  Maybe if more companies take this stance it will begin to make financial sense to fix and support these Office macros.

This topic has been open for a long time now. The user comments are unanimous that the macros for embedding power point and especially excel files in pages are crucial. Furthermore, there are some longstanding and serious bugs in these macros which have been ignored. For example, the feature that allows users to select the range of the excel worksheet to be display is broken (CONF-31741). This lack of support is becoming a serious obstacle to continued use of Confluence within my organization!!

Is it too much to ask that Atlassian at least provide some clarity about the roadmap for not only retaining but repairing and perhaps improving this essential functionality?

This is one more VOTE AGAINST withdrawing the View File macros.

the following features are extremely useful in the viewxls or other "view-Office" macros, and are lost with the new "view-file" behavior:

• viewing the file directly from the page display, without having to open the attachment
• searching the file content, again directly from the page display

Also, our users complain about the new behavior which the "view-file" macro imposed unilaterally to all links to attachments: regardless of the file type, clicking on the link now opens the preview window, adding one more click to go when all you want to do is download the file. Many users are turned off by this behavior, particularly with examples such as an attached Outlook model, where all you want to do is open the attachment with Outlook, instead of being told that the preview is not available.

50% of our users are Microsoft-oriented, so this change would entail:

• a significant effort for each page that has to be converted
• no way to reproduce the same (until now, satisfactory) behavior
• a lot of frustration

In my opinion, a lot of development effort has to be put on native Confluence table functions before we could expect people to be happy with them, as opposed to being able to browse, search and edit easily an Excel file with the viewxls macro.

At least for Confluence 6 the macros are still available & working. We just upgraded to 6.0.3. As long as there is only the mediocre preview "solution" available & no plan how to migrate to a better solution providing AT LEAST the same experience as the current macros, Atlassian for sure will not remove the macros. In our case we've to change about 1500 pages...

This is a TERRIBLE IDEA.  This is by far one of the MOST useful macros at my company.  The ability to display multiple panes of information on a single page which is driven by a single excel file has been extremely valuable to my company as it saves a great deal of time assembling the data.

Also a vote against this! Please don't remove this macro, maybe put some time and effort in and make it better usable (like showing the right format and stuff..).

The direct information display of this macro is way better than an extra preview, which also doesn't work completely proper btw.

No! This comment ist a Vote against! Please dont remove this macro!

This is a vote against removing such an amazing macro!!

Does this mean the search functionality will stop searching the live text with the file?

oh, my understanding is or was that voting for this ticket means to object to the removal of the macro.
Almost every comment writer on this ticket did complain about this proposal.

How to object then? There is no "vote against" in Jira.

I want to state clearly that I want to keep the Office Viewing macro(s). At least as long as Atlassian is unable to provide a replacement macro which has the same functionality. The preview marco does not!

Without this macro I won't migrate to that release which removes it. (6.x?)

you should retract your vote then.

If I vote for this issue (which I just did), what did I vote for? Is it voting for the removal of the office macro's of against the removal and pro keeping them?
I want to keep them! I assume I voted correctly, please let me know if I am wrong, then I will retract my vote ...

It would really credit Atlasssian if they pay attention to the needs of the customers instead of force them to use their own technology. I have learned that the customer is always right, and one should listen to them
It is clear from all these comments that the view file macro, and especially the embedded excel functionality is used widely and for good reason. Indeed the new view functionality is not working properly, especially for excel and powerpoint!

Atlasssian, what do we have to do to make you change your mind and keep the view file macro's?

Hi @Sebastian Kopf,

Migrated from 5.9.7 to 5.10.3 two weeks ago. PDF and Powerpoint no longer work properly. Most of the files have problems loading certain pages and just display gray background.

did you raise a support request on this issue, and if so, what was the outcome?

I see the same problem in 5.10.4 !! Powerpoint file (pptx) , trying to use the new viewer. It shows only the slide background (anything which is on the slide template) but all content is missing ! Same powerpoint file is rendered correctly in 5.8.
Sounds like a general problem.

sebastian.kopf595157664, I would suggest you raise a support request as this behaviour sounds unexpected.

Migrated from 5.9.7 to 5.10.3 two weeks ago. PDF and Powerpoint no longer work properly. Most of the files have problems loading certain pages and just display gray background.
As atlassian no longer fixes issues for those macros it is time to create a feature complete replacement and provide a migration plan.

Alice, great summary comment and bullets, wish we could 'like' some of these comments but in lieu of that I give you 'two thumbs up'!

Adam, THANK YOU for the official Atlassian update on this issue. That information is helpful and reassuring and much appreciated by all watching this issue. 

However, what I'm not sure has gotten across - at least I'm not sure we have seen it acknowledged - is that the specific functionality the View File plugins provide of displaying a rendering of an attached document ON a page, (a) surrounded by context (this is another key element for some of us) and (b) not requiring further clicks is a HUGE differentiator from other tools out there.. 

Why walk away from that - versus keeping it and letting more Confluence users know about it!

It's a big productivity enhancer by those virtues alone but receives additional karma from the benefit it affords casual Confluence users. How or why?  Because from one click on a link to the page, the user is there, seeing the displayed content and any context that may have been placed around it.  One click and done, no instruction needed. 

Dropping the View File macros sounds to me like adding back in complexity, however subtle, for casual users (e.g. a few more clicks, going back and forth to a view of the file... whereas we would like to see development that further simplifies the use of the existing viewfile macro functionality).  I can think of a few examples in my case where the business owner(s) are ecstatic about the 'elegance' of the solution these macros provide and losing this feature may result - for these high-profile use cases (in a Fortune 500 company by the way) - in them looking at other available tools we already own that don't offer this, but have other benefits that keep things as simple as possible.  For example, we have Box that is awesome for many reasons but they can't do what we can accomplish with a file displayed on a page surrounded by other Confluence page goodness. And in my world, the more happy internal users of Confluence, the more likelihood we will grow its use and keep it around as one of the cornerstone collaboration platforms.  

Is anyone at Atlassian interested in seeing examples of the type of use cases we're talking about? I don't want to post them publicly but will be happy to send screenshots via email directly to interested Atlassians. Could that help?

My organization relies heavily on the Excel/Word embed macros. For the fastest possible way to view attachment content and fastest way to edit that attachment from Confluence. The new preview function is not an acceptable replacement.

Issues with the preview:

• Attachment content isn't embedded in the page. Extra clicks to see it.
• Excel docs are not readable! No grid lines, the text is not in the same formatting as the original document, only the first two columns appear, with subsequent columns as additional pages rather than a horizontal scroll bar, and there's a noticeable lag time scrolling through the document.

Confluence will always exist alongside the Office Suite for us, not replace it - I don't think my company is alone in this. It's crucial to have ways to view and edit my office documents from Confluence in order to keep it relevant to my company!

We depend on this macro, especially the 'Edit Document' feature to be able edit/add contents inline to the Excel/Word/PPT. This is one of the features that users like and we have been able to move users from Sharepoint to confluence.

If this feature is disabled or support withdrawn then we will have an exodus of customers back to Sharepoint.

Thank you for your ongoing feedback regarding this issue.

Just to re-iterate some of the facts as of today, as per the summary update on the 1st June 2016:

• The existing macros are still in 5.10 and I can confirm will also be in the next major release.
• We will provide plenty of notice when removing these macros
• We are aware of the gaps in functionality of the old View File and its replacement and appreciate the feedback on this ticket in order to determine what gaps might need to be filled, and subsequently the timing related to removing the old macros.
• It should not assumed that pages will be destroyed, generally when we remove functionality (such as this) we provide upgrade tasks to replace the existing macros with the new one.

So it appears that Atassian doesn't want to budge on this issue. The only alternative we have is to not upgrade to the version that deprecates these Macros. To do so would destroy hundreds of pages.

At which point I don't see the point of continuing to pay an annual maintenance renewal fee.

I fully agree with what Jonathan Greene said and deprecating a free addon and recommending a heavyweight addon at extra cost is a disgrace. This addon was one of the main selling points in us choosing Confluence and I feel let down.

I cannot agree more to what @Jonathan Greene said. This was one of the decisive features for settling with Confuence.

Also want to add my voice to the notion that this is a bad idea for all your business, non-power users. What is planned to replace all the lost functionality?

I echo many of the previous complaints about your plans to eliminate the Office Excel macro. In particular, being able to display a spreadsheet in-line in a page is extremely useful and was crucial in our choice to use Confluence. The thumbnail image available under the new method is useless because there is no way to select the range of columns/rows to be displayed as there was in the Office Excel macro,

Your support team suggested I investigate the Excel for Confluence add-on from Bob Swift. This is not a substitute for these reasons:
(1) This add-on is very heavy weight. I could not even install it since it required a reconfiguration of our underlying database.
(2) This add-on is table centric. Much of its functionality assumes the spreadsheet contains a simple table, which is certainly not always the case.
(3) It seems offensive to deprecate existing free, built-in functionality in favor of an extra-cost add on that is not directly backed by Atlassian.

Another important comment I wanted to mention is that this feature is being used organization wide in our company and because this is deprecated, it is preventing us from updating to the latest version of Confluence!

Our instance is not externally facing, it is internal only, and the view file macro is just fine for most of the document types EXCEPT excel. Without more advance table controls within Confluence, many people have used the embedded excel documents using the Excel Macro to accommodate the more advance table and spreadsheet needs without having to open the file explicitly.

As for the plugin, even "just an extension" doesn't fly in financial institutions. Our organization tightly controls what can and cannot be installed to browsers and will administratively remove anything that is not sanctioned. We would have to work with our corporate image group to ensure that the extension be allowed and then we'd probably have to work with them to have it pushed out globally because we can't expect that our users take that step on their own. It's a barrier to using the tool that non-technical users in particular won't be able to stomach.

@Lisa Barnes,

I don't believe your #2 is correct. If the user doesn't have rights to edit a page, they are also unable to edit the macro document as well. They have the ability to save it elsewhere, but not edit the document directly on the page. If you have a different use case that gets around it, please provide an example. If you are worried about have specific groups of users edit files, you can also lock down macro types to groups using the following macro: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/org.swift.confluence.macrosecurity/server/overview

I believe the plugin is just an extension that doesn't require admin rights to be enabled. It isn't like an exe file that needs installer privileges. Maybe your IT locks down your plugins somehow, but that isn't typical of a windows permission set at least.

Also, not everybody uses confluence as an external "outward" facing tool. Many use it for internal knowledgebases and documentation, and the view file macro suites the needs perfectly. I think many people on this ticket would agree.

@Adam Barnes,

I would like encourage you, your peers and your superiors, as the product management team, to really read through each and every comments received about this, including my original post on January 13, 2016, to see why the decision to deprecate and remove in a future version the view file macros is a bad idea. Put yourselves in your customers (that would be all of us on this thread) shoes. I summarize for you below the same 4 points I made in my original post and the very key point for us is #4 below regarding the new file preview plug-in:
1) we can't search the content
2) the file viewer appears to allow viewers to edit the document if a plug in is downloaded - we DO NOT want this
3) the file view allows viewers to comment within the document - we DO NOT want this
4) asking our users to download a plug in in order to search the file's content is a NO-GO option because many of our users works for banks on locked down systems (i.e. they are not allowed to install anything on their desktop/laptop without their banks' IT/security approvals).

The Atlassian team needs to understand how their customers are deploying Confluence. For my client all the content is "outward" facing (B2C if you will even though we're a standards organization) and we cannot require the "customer" to have to download the viewer plug-in to their desktop/laptop. This point is a show stopper for us.

I have already commented and expressed my discontent for the actual proposed replacement of these macros and I appreciate that there has been a partial step back from Altassian when stating that the macros will remain there until a proper replacement will be available.
When this will happen I also recommend providing an automatic update tool.
But what I cannot understand since day one is why on earth this "incident" is marked as a minor bug! it is not a bug at all and it is not a minor change!

@Adam Barnes wrote:

"as it provides a much better (and more performant) way to display Office and PDF files on your pages"

Adam, as you can see when you read through all the comments (make sure to expand those which are not immediatelly shown by Jira), it is neither better nor more performant.

not better:

• There are known issues where the new viewer does not correctly render the documents
• For some Office and PDF documents, the new viewer fails completely and requires to download the document
• Other than its name suggests, it does not provide an inline preview of the document within the page's text
• It takes more clicks to read the document

(more details in the earlier comments) Also related: CONF-36899

not performant:

• while the new viewer caches the confluence-internal representation of the Office/PDF document and THEN is fast enough, it does take very long time when a user is the first one to view a document, or once the document has been removed from the cache (after a few days of no access).
• This is especially true for Powerpoint documents. It may take several minutes to display a large Powerpoint document

Bottom line, the new viewer is not an acceptable replacement yet for the viewfile (viewdoc,viewppt,viewpdf, viewexec) macro(s).

And, once the new viewer will have all the required functionality and performance, it will be required for Atlassian to provide a migration tool to substitute the existing view macros in all pages system-wide before removing these macros. The result of such a migration has to update the pages without screwing them up. The result must be an identical look to page readers. (inline view, same size, same features). Sounds like a challenge, huh?

btw, why is @mention not working in this Jira instance? Not everyone knows to use the old Wiki syntax ( [~name] ) anymore.

@hans-peter.geier - thanks a lot for sharing those insights!

There seems to be a total disconnect between the jira and the product management (fail!?), it seems like they have never heard of this place here, otherwise you would expect them to actually try to inform people here instead of leaving everyone in the dark about future plans and writing some oldschool emails to individuals.

I received this answer from the Confluence Product manager:

from: Adam Barnes
31/May/16 11:09 AM

Hi Hans-Peter,
The wording around the discontinuation is not entirely clear. We like to be proactive in announcing our plan to discontinue and remove features from the product to ensure that We can get the feedback such as yours. We are fully aware of the gaps between the macros in question and the new files macro. Due to the feedback regarding the desire to fill these gaps we have yet to determine in which version we can close some of these gaps and subsequently remove the older macros. We are about to release 5.10, which will contain the old macros and there is a good chance at this point that 6.0 will still contain them too. I hope this answers your concerns in the near term and please continue to follow the JIRA issue for updates.

and: (a general answer to my concern regarding many open defects which don't seem to be addressed)

from: Adam Barnes
25/May/16 2:46 PM

Hi Hans-Peter Geier, thank you for taking the time to raise this support request and providing the subsequent constructive feedback.
I am a Product Manager for Confluence and wanted to touch base with you to let you know that your feedback has been heard. I appreciate your concerns regarding bug fixes. We have made an increased investment in bugfix over the past 12+ months and will continue to be vigilant in our QA process and in addressing as many high user impacting bugs as practicable. Additionally, I have recently been taking additional actions to research the scope of some broader topics relating to things such as the office-connector. As a result of this I hope that we might be able to make additional progress in this and other facets of Confluence.
Please continue to vote and provide constructive comment on issues to help us in assessing the issues that affect you most.
Regards
Adam Barnes
Senior Product Manager - Confluence

@Jira:
Hello. Many people within our organization use this plugin to allow for visibility to specific parts of large spreadsheets. This is VERY important to us. We have a large organization and this gives very direct feedback to everyone who visits the Confluence page. This is important enough that I would not want to move to the later versions Confluence if this is removed. The Viewer doesn’t come close to fulfilling what this plugin does.

Hi,
I've used the Excel macro to view my Excel file columns which worked out quite well. With the new preview I have the problem, that it's not possible to show all colums as before. The only way to get the same view as the Excel macro provides is to "view" the file (by clicking on the view-button). Unfortunatelly this is a really awkward way to do so.
Is there an easier way to show this view?
Thanks Bettina

@Patrick
Just to clarify this issue: The "Edit in Office" feature wasn't working with Chrome since years due to some security restriction in Chrome. With the latest Chrome & Confluence release "Edit in Office" is finally working with Chrome, but Atlassian by now didn't enable this feature for Chrome when using preview. So, yes, you can edit Office documents in Chrome, but you either have to use the attachments overview page, the attachments macro or the view file macro. Edit from inside the preview doesn't work, as the button is hidden.

@Jan-Peter @Kim Oh! I guess I missed it in the release notes, so I didn't know that the button was disabled just from chrome users. We just upgraded to 5.9.9 and ofc I'm using chrome. Thanks for clarifying this!

Thanks, Jan-Peter!

Hi Kim,

we're on 5.9.9 Edit in Office is still available in old & new macro. Only in Chrome you won't see the link, as it is disabled by Confluence. You still can edit the attachments thru the attachment page. In Firefox / IE everything is as before.

Jan-Peter

I am on CLOUD and can't embedd Excel since the old Office Excel macro doesn't work (and since it's deprecated is unsupported) and the new file upload, preview and comment experience, is unfit for spreadsheets.
I am using an adjusted image of the spreadsheet instead.

No, I'm aware it's deprecated. I've been commenting on this thread already. I'm just worried that people are actually seeing the functions come out already with later versions of 5.9.x. I'm on 5.9.5.

Here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2015/11/deprecated-macros-for-confluence

@Patrick, what version of Confluence are you using where you've seen this change? I'm about to upgrade my server version of Confluence to fix the Chrome issue but I don't want to do that at the expense of the Office functions. I don't see anything in the release notes about these features being taken out so I thought I'd ask you.

I agree with most of the comments here.

Honestly I thought you guys where going to take away the "Edit in office" entirely, because I couldn't find the "Edit in office"-button anywhere in the new macro.
Edit: Only in Chrome you won't see the link, as it is disabled by Confluence.

Also Excel sheets do not work as well in the new office document macro compared to the old one. As some one already pointed out that the new macro creates page breaks kinda randomly and if the excel sheet has a large number of columns, so that there is quite a lot of width to the sheet, everything in the viewer just turns out looking pretty horrible and unusable.

Others have said this much better than I can, but I wanted to put my support in the DO NOT take away the View Files macro unless you replace it with something that provides at a minimum the same functionality (which to date you haven't.)

BTW I tried using recommended preview file feature and consistently get conversion errors: unable to preview document.

The View File macros are still available in Confluence 5.9 and Confluence Cloud, but we recommend using the new file upload, preview and comment experience (released in Confluence 5.7) for all your new files, as it provides a much better (and more performant) way to display Office and PDF files on your pages

Can someone tell me how can now use the new experience to display an excel sheet to fit in a single page? Confluence inserts page breaks that make this unreadable. I would expect that zoom would fit the sheet, but this only changes the font size.

Well said.