The issues still exists as of 12/Jul/2023.

Hope for a soonest solution.

I think the name "export to Word" is misleading and should be changed. This issue proves that everybody understood Word = .docx, which clearly is not the case here.

IMHO it would be much better

a) to rename the current function to "export as HTML" so that people know what to expect

b) to add a proper export function called "export as <format>". Doesn't have to be .docx if it's complicated, other formats may be enough to correctly represent a Confluence page (rtf?)

Converting the PDF to Word removes any links to Confluence, including links not only to downloadable files but to actual Confluence pages (any other kind of external links are fine). This is not an acceptable workaround as users need to access downloads stored on Confluence, or access reference pages in Confluence. Exporting to PDF and using as PDF would be a decent enough workaround IF you didn't need to do any further editing AND the headings built bookmarks in PDF, which they do not. You have to purchase a separate plug-in for this, which puts it back into the not-a-workaround category. Please fix this. 

That's hardly a workaround. It only works if you have MS Office (probably only on Windows, not even Mac?).

If calling it "Export to Word" isn't a bug, it's at very least playing fast and loose with interpretation. It is reasonable to expect 'Export to Word' to write a document that would be readable by Word compatible software. Perhaps the way you're doing it is easier than converting a Confluence page to docx, so I assume that this is a cut corner and not an attempt at vendor lock-in.

Please, don't rename the menu item. Do the right thing and make your Export to Word function write a .docx.

I can confirm this still has not been fixed on Confluence 6.15.1

Confirmed it still doesn't work on:

• Can confirm, "Export to Word" feature doesn't work.
• Please rename this action to "Export to HTML" or "Export to Email Format" - as this seems to be what it's actually doing here.
• Google Docs cannot even open the "Export to Word" Confluence page.

+

This issue has been open for almost six years now. Not sure why it is labelled as a "suggestion", when it is clearly a bug. "Export to Word" does not export to Word, it exports a .eml file, with a text/html MIME part (and possibly a bunch of attachments).

Either really export to Word (or, better yet, ODF), or stop calling it "Word". "Export to HTML wrapped in a weird email format, that just happens to open in MS Word," would be a better description, although I do understand that that does not easily fit in a drop-down menu.

Please give us news on this issue: It's an issue for my company as well.

That's really sad that one can't actually export a page to a .doc/.docx file correctly. Because essentially this "Export to Word" feature doesn't really work.

Having Confluence as the main storage for all the company documentation is really great, but not being able to export pages (e.g., to prepare them for sending to external customers) makes it much less useful.

You could all try "Feedback to the Founders" at https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact

I commented on this about a year ago.

@Atlassian: Any news on that? This is a crucial feature and should just work as expected, at least this issue should be followed up and some information should be provided about the status of Atlassian activities.

as usual, Atlassian policy on issues is still "just ignore customers" 

The export is still now working. After 5 years, does Atlassian intend to do something or should we drop Confluence altogether?

Atlassian: any update on this? The workaround is not usable.

If you use ripmime you can get something slightly less unbearable that imports better into libreoffice.

ripmime -v -i crap-exported-by-confluence.doc
open exported.html

TBH Atlassian just doesn't seem to give a hoot for many many years, I actively seek alternatives these days. 

More editors which cannot read this "Word export"

LibreOffice behaves in the same way - (though I suppose LibreOffice is mostly OpenOffice anyway)

GoogleDrive and GoogleDocs do not recognise it as a word document and cannot preview or edit these fake word files. 

The workaround of asking users to save to PDF is not appropriate. 

This issue has been open for nearly 5 years now

Note that this particular JIRA issue does get exported to Word correctly, so there is definitely a way to do it. Can someone please fix this?

I really think the subject of this should be changed to "Export to Word uses illegal MIME envelope" and the type should be changed to "BUG".

Asking users to first export to PDF, and then use another tool to convert to Word is not a solution.

abarnes@atlassian.com , please just correct the MIME envelope and 100% users are happy

A very unpleasant bug. The MIME envelope is really incorrect. If it were correct, I would be able at least to open it using a browser... Even that would be a partial solution.

P.S. 6.1 is affected, too.

@abarnes: Indeed, as Tom  Eicher wrote above: Drop the MIME envelope and let our non-Microsoft word processors do the work they are intended to also do, namely handle MS Word files (as opposed to MIME envelopes)!

@abarnes no this is a bug. you have a perfectly working export, but it is wrapped in an illegal MIME envelope, which only works when MS Office / Outlook installed on Windows.

(this is what the original subject of this bug was before it was changed around many times. please see the original description!).

actually, having MS Word Format is ok for most Linux Users, Libre and Open Office and others can read it. It's just the illegal MIME envelope that prevents people from using it...

@bmcnamara are you sure not having MS Office installed (or not using Windows) is "edge case or very hard to experience " !?!?

As our current export to Word feature uses a non-standard Word format, it is only compatible with Microsoft Word. Not being able to open these files in other applications such as Open Office or Google Docs is expected behaviour. We've updated our documentation to make this limitation clearer.  

We have investigated changing to an alternative format (such as an XML based docx file that could be opened in other applications) but found that it is not a straightforward change. 

The workaround provided in this issue is the best way to make sure your exported files can be opened in multiple applications.

Please continue to vote on this issue to indicate your desire for this support.

This also affects me, on a 6.0.1 Server instance. Please add affected versions.

Fix it already!
This is a basic funtionality and we expect it to just work.

Instead of adding useless "features" all day long, get your things together and fix the basics.
This is beyond annoying.

this ticket is proof that sometimes support and product development processes get out of hand and beyond sanity...

instead of removing an illegal MIME envelope from an otherwise perfectly working Word export, which should take a developer 1-2hrs, this issue, and several related ones, are being pushed around, commented, updated, tagged, priorized, scoped, impact-analyzed, workarounded ... for four years now ...

This is an issue for me as well, I have two small confluence instances (one fully updated, the other one the prod version) each of these have this problem. I don't want to generate an XML, nor do I want to download a PDF to convert it into a word.

Remove the button, rename it or fix the problem

Either way this "feature" is broken by all rights

Just chiming in on this issue. I reported this as an issue to Atlassian for Confluence 5.9.4, and they directed me to this bug.

I think it's really ridiculous that they have not fixed this issue, considering how long it has been identified by the community.

As others have noted, there are two solutions to this problem:
1) Rename button from "Export to Word" to "Export to Email" to properly reflect the output format
2) Actually export a Word document (.doc) file

Given that most of us are looking for the ability to export to a Microsoft Office format, solution 2 is preferred.

My organization is currently using Confluence on a 10 user license as a limited trial. If anyone from Atlassian is listening, we will not license Confluence for our organization unless this issue is fixed!

Is this going to be fixed? This is a HUGE hindrance since we use LibreOffice.

The bugfix is to rename "Export to Word" to "Export to RFC822/MIME-formatted HTML". (What was the use case that drove this change, anyway? I can't think of a use for this format...)
The feature request is to actually export to DOC, DOCX or even RTF format.

"Export to Excel" has the same problem - that's not an XLS file, that's an RFC822/MIME-formatted HTML file.
JIRA 6.4 (among others) has the same problem, too.

For folks that use Google Docs - select-all / copy / paste works for many documents and you can paste to both Google Word and Google Spreadsheets.

shaffenden
Either fix it or remove it.

• If you claim this is a feature request then you should remove the button and help documentation
• If you claim the feature is there then fix it. It is not a little broken, it is not working at all.

The feature is called "export to Word", but what you get is an mhtml file with .doc extension. It would be nice to get an actual document type of file like you'd expect that feature to do

This feature was present and functioning... a word export should produce a standard doc format..it seems like a bug..

I second @jkugler 's comment. We used to use this feature successfully. It would be nice to have it back.

@steve:

I would tend to disagree with your assessment. This is a feature that used to work properly. I don't know when it was changed, but I do remember that this feature did work, because we used it as a regular export of one of our pages, and the exported page was processed by tools that were expecting properly formed Word documents.

I'm going to remove this issue from our immediate backlog. After investigation, in order to resolve this issue we would need to re-implement the Export page to word functionality which is outside the scope of the bugfix team.

I'm going to convert this to a feature request in order to get one of our features teams to address this.

Regards
Steve Haffenden
Confluence Bugmaster

5.6.3 & 5.6.4 is still affected with this bug. I'm not able to export even from your official Confluence site, and exporting to PDF is also a no-go for me since I have long tables which are "cut" to viewport in PDF - only way is to use Windows, which I tend to avoid.

We would be happy if Atlassian would fix this issue asap.

This workaround is of little use to Linux/Macos users of Libre/OpenOffice...

Hey Tom, thank you very much for the explanation. I think I realize the consequences now.

Hey Paula, no, all exports are always broken, they just work "by chance" if someone has MS Office and MS Outlook installed on MS Windows.
All Mac and Linux user are shut out, and very unnecessarly so!
Please configure your Browser to "save" or "ask" upon attachment, then click "Export" an any page, and save the file.
You will see the file starts like

Message-ID: <2198380.29.1392631308636.JavaMail.js-confluence@XXX.atlassian.net>
Subject: Exported From Confluence
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
    boundary="----=_Part_28_197779.1392631308636"

------=_Part_28_197779.1392631308636
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Location: file:///C:/exported.html

<html xmlns:o=3D'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office'
      xmlns:w=3D'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word'
      xmlns:v=3D'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml'
      xmlns=3D'urn:w3-org-ns:HTML'>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html; charset=3Dutf-8=
">
    <title>XXX Screencast</title>
    <!--[if gte mso 9]>
    <xml>
        <o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
...

please note that no document format starts with Message-ID - thats a (pseudo?) MIME email message format.
please also find the "c:\" reference that the original reporter noted.

Hey Tom,
well I am able to export most of the pages to MS Word successfully . But some pages, they seem to be very large and have images on it, result in the described error. I have also raised a question on Atlassian Answers on it. So I thought as long as this issue is not fixed, I just can avoid content which causes problems... Maybe someone can tell me if I understood something wrong ;-(

It does affect "current OnDemand", which is supposedly 5.3.4.
About your comment 03/Jan ... what do you mean ? This happens for any and all pages AFAIK.

Does it affect Version 5.3.4, too?

Can anybody shrink down the possible content of a page which causes this problem?

We encountered the same issue. As a result, we had to create a new page for future exports to Word. We use Microsoft Word 2003 and MS Word 2010 Standard.

Sorry, if i am asking very confused here now: At several places here is the same problem illustrated and i would like to ask if there's any progress here?

Would it help if I tell, when I activate the placholder for graphics feature, I recieve the following line:

{ INCLUDEPICTURE  \d "file:///C:\\exported.htmld xyztext" \*MERGEFORMATINET }

As I am sure our server is not running Windows I am wondering where he looks after device C. And OSX would also have no chance to look for.