This affects our company as well with Confluence (LTS) Version 7.4.8 which is the most actual on to this date. Our users reported this also with xlsx and pptx files. 

This is a serious issue and makes document management inconvenient as it this is a major feature of Confluence.
As there is no one assigned and there has not been a comment from Atlassian should users assume this is not on the backlog?

I get around this by creating a button that simply does a direct download (no preview). Using the UI Button macro provided for free to Confluence server as part of the Refined Toolkit for Confluence.

1. Attach your document to the page via the attachment window. .i.e. don't include it as a visible part of the page.
2. Right click and copy the link to the attachment
3. Edit page and add a UI Button macro with the URL from the attachment

Clicking the button on the page will direct download whatever file you linked.

Still a workaround to a bug, but it gets the job done. 

My users are still facing this issue in Confluence 7.4.5 (e.g. with JSON Attachments).

The workaround has been deleted form Bitbucket. We are having the probleme only with XLSX files. Any hints?

this is a bug, not an improvement. With Atlasssian significantly increasing the support cost of the product, we should receive better support. It appears the consensus from the comments is in agreement. Please change from improvement to bug and provide a date for resolution. This is holding up our upgrade.

As mentioned in Answers:
It's nice to have new "features" but when @atlassian implements such features a Admin (like me) should be able to at least disable them without tempering the source code :/

Atlassian, I am also facing the same problem after upgrading my instance from 5.6.6 to 5.7.1 where I am unable to preview the PDF files from the space.

Please provide a workaround for the same.

Atlassian, this is a bug, not an improvement. If I provide a fancy feature that only works in certain cases and fails in an unfriendly way in other cases, it is a regression from the previous behavior in which the feature didn't exist at all. Therefore it is a bug. To get back to old status quo for the cases where the feature doesn't work, you need a bug fix, not an improvment.

Yes, this is very annoying and is already impacting our users. The system should know when it renders the initial page what file types it can support in preview mode and which it can't, and then automatically display the proper link, instead of having us update hundreds of pages.

Please fix as soon as possible.

This is also an issue for my customers. My workaround was a macro that inserts the link as manually updating all of the links will mean that they all need to be re-update when the behavior changes as well as re-updated when the attachment gets updated. By using a macro, I'm hoping I can do some kind of search and replace to get rid of the macro and back to normal behavior when Atlassian restores the previous functionality.

My macro can be downloaded (as well as the source code) here

https://bitbucket.org/selberg/download-attachment/overview

Oh, so it doesn't show the preview for "Web Link". That's interesting. Thanks for the workaround. Still a lot of work to fix all pages that we already have, but I appreciate that you've taken the time to find a workaround!

Hi kittelmann,

I'm sorry to hear the new preview feature is causing you trouble. I have been taking a look at this issue and I think I may have a workaround that might let you achieve the setup you are after.

For each attachment download you want to configure in the page:
1. On the affected page go to the "Attachments" page (... -> Attachments)
2. Find the attachment you want to link to in the list and right click and select "Copy link address" (this is for chrome, similar options are available in other browsers)
3. Go back to view the page
4. Edit the page
5. Insert a new link using the "Insert link" menu icon
6. Paste the URL from step 2 into the "Address" field
7. Update the "Link text" field to the text you would like to appear on the page
8. Save the page

I hope this workaround works for you. We will continue to investigate at a longer term solution to cater for this scenario but hopefully this can get you up and running in the meantime.

Regards,
Brendan.

It was working just fine until the last release. We didn't have the preview, and that was just fine.

Then you added this functionality, and suddenly my customers are having problems downloading files from our documentation system (that you call Atlassian Cloud).

It was working before. It's not working now. Hence, it's a bug. And not an improvement.