+1 

The way you used to be able to define how attachments appeared in the article was vastly better than the current attachment handling. That was a massive functionality diminishment.

Any traction on this from Atlassian, this has been a huge issue for our users and the download all option not so great.

The problem with the current preview is that it takes more effort to download the file file : one must click on the link for the preview, and then click on the tiny icon on the right hand side in order to download the file. Downloading is necessary when one wants to edit the file or simply print it correctly.

This Suggestion has been sitting around for so long, I had given up hope that Atlassian would ever pay it any attention.  But seeing that it has a status of "Gathering Interest," I'll add my vote in favor.  The suggested solutions include "Disable by User," but that would not be my preference. Read the cases in the comments: the problem is not one of personal preference, it is about the software behaving properly.

Typical installations involve the power users, who know how to control the software, and many non-power users, who just take whatever they get.  Requiring each user to take separate action will just result in a lot of frustrated non-power users, annoyed at how stupid the behavior is, but without the knowledge or time to fix it for themselves.

+1

The new preview is a step backwards and should be configurable.

@Atlassian: Does anybody really read and gather our concerns and problems?

We too would VERY MUCH LOVE to have a way to disable the universal preview( selectively by space or application, if possible).  We have a "process space repository" in which a large number of files  (docx, pdf, xlsx ) are attached to a page in the space which allows other documents and wiki pages to easily link to them ( we bypass the previewer by manually entering the url directly into the links).  Unfortunately, it appears that the universal preview essentially renders the SEARCH capability useless. If a search is made for a given filename, the search goes off to never-never land and can take up to 10 or 15 minutes  to return and open the file (in the previewer which we would have rather opened in the files native program in the first place). To make things worse ( and totally confusing),  about a minute or 2 into the search, the attachments page is displayed which leaves you staring at a totally unsorted list of files ...  I have been told the only solution is to break  the files up into  groups of 100 files or less per page, which is not really a viable solution for us.  I appologize for the length of this comment, but this issue has been frustrating us for over 2 years now... prior to the previewer, searches returned in less than 2 seconds!

Absolutely. I would like to suggest yet another solution: to have no preview at all. I would still prefer this over the current forced preview.

Thank you!

I'm responsible for a 10.000-User Confluence-Server Solution. Many Users asked me how to overule the Universal-Preview. Especially for Excel-Files it makes no sense, because Preview has no functionality, which is needed to use most of the Excel-Tables (filter, sort, expand, etc.).

In addition, Print- and Search-Functionality directly on Universal-Preview is requested by many Users, especially for PDF-Files.

Double-plus-good for Deborah Chandran's suggestion.  While more flexibility for the defaults would be nice, this really needs to be configurable at a per-object level.

We have some large Excel sheets which doesn't look good at all using the document preview (it doesn't support a horizontal scrollbar), so being able to disable the preview for a single link/file would be very helpful.

Another vote for this feature.

I'd like an option with each object that I display on a page to specify the clicked on behavior:

1. Nothing (in this case, the object just displays, it isn't clickable, most useful for images
2. Download
3. Preview (open in the previewer)

It would be nice if there were a variable that we could set that defines the default behavior for the server/space/page as well. 

Seems like a common concern, and shouldn't be hard to implement.

Hi team,

it could be great to have the possibility to have the possibility to disable plugin only for some Confluence spaces.

Best regards,

This feature would not only be welcome, it is a necessity. It would be better, in fact, not to have a preview than the current solution. Why?

• I, like many other users, only click on an attachment when I want to download it, and have configured my browser not to use its preview, but save the file or start an application.
• most attachment types have no preview, and the previewer is just an extra annoyance
• with types like pdf, the previewers never support nearly the full feature set and functionality (e.g. to show digital signature info, have the special fonts for some docs) and are full of bugs (bad rendering, crashes) and shortcomings (bad navigation, bad search).
• Finally, I find the preview feature an ugly design (too much of the visual context changes) and clumsy to use, it deludes me into losing the actual page, like clicking back or closing the tab in the browser.

So, I want to disable preview for myself completely, for my account.

I would like to see this feature too please.

Same issue here, people complaining that the preview feature should be able to be selectively disabled as it does not behave consistently across browsers.

We're in the same situation. Our users are getting annoyed with the preview window. Please give us the option to switch this off for individual links.

That plugin works fantastic, thanks for sharing @Matin Schiemann.

 Honestly amazed this doesn't already exist in software as popular as Confluence.  I hope Atlassian chooses to implement this officially, as there is no reason any wants an extra click to download a zip file (or view an awful preview of an 8-sheet Excel document)

I agree with joe.moretti, it would great to be able to disable preview feature per page or per attachment.

Also, as the description says "Disable preview for certain file extensions" would be handy too. For example, most (if not all) modern browsers can display PDF files in browser, and I would argue more reliably so than Confluence's preview feature. Personally I don't even use a separate PDF reader software, I use Chrome & Firefox as my readers.

Bump.

Well, as the addon is a gift from https://bitbucket.org/selberg/, you might try to contact him on problems with his work. He might want some compensation though.

i tested on win7, chrome, FF, IE doesn t work

Hi Adriaan,

not in our case, Chrome and Windows 7 / 8 / 10.

Best

Matin

if oyu directly click on the link it opens a preview pane still, you have to right click and open with isn t there a way to disable the preview through the plugin?

Hi All,

Scott Selberg provided an addon which supplies a macro for direct download links of attachments. See:
https://bitbucket.org/selberg/download-attachment/downloads

Works well for us for the time beeing.

Kudos to Scott for his work.

Best

Matin

We provide our official documentation via Confluence, and customers can download software examples from our documentation site (ZIP). Download should start immediately on clicking the link - not trying to preview a ZIP file.

Atlassian needs to find a solution for this, either make a full effort and embed and fully support excel or just allow on off feature through html to enable or disable the preview of files and have in plugin setting if preview should be by default on or off

and also be able to specify the preview by file extension type

Atlassian needs to find a solution for this, either make a full effort and embed and fully support excel or just allow on off feature through html to enable or disable the preview of files and have in plugin setting if preview should be by default on or off

and also be able to specify the preview by file extension type

The preview is really only generally useful for images. Even disabling for certain filetypes would not really help, for some PDFs preview might be helpful, for PDF forms it is definitely not (we have users calling support because they cannot fill and send the forms...). In our usecase, which is collaborative intranet in a non-IT company (just normal users), we need to be able to disable the preview per link, or for the attachments macro, or globally (which at least is very urgent!).

The usability of the preview should definitely be optimized, the download link is way to low-key and the symbol is not self-explaning.

Else, attachments which cannot be previed, must be downloaded instantly.

Please help us.

The Excel files are horrible to preview and I'm getting calls from confused users. -> we are having same issue! this should be patched up ASAP

force excel to download selectively

Upgraded to 5.9.4.
The Excel files are horrible to preview and I'm getting calls from confused users.

I agree. It's quite annoying that Excel-files aren't downloaded instantly.

It would be great if we could deactivate the preview plugin based on the extension.

Suggestion no. 4: Disable preview on per user basis

Dear Atlassian, I can imagine such a feature might be useful for a lot of users. Please, try to image that such a feature might also be disturbing or even annoying for the others. So please, always, ALWAYS follow any new feature introduction with an option to disable it quickly and easily.

Voting this issue !!!

can it be possible to custom preview according to file extension? For example, It's important for huge excel files, which confluence does not preview properly.

Additionally we discovered problem with "edit" file inside preview by "..." tab inside Chome browser. This option disappears in Chrome at all.

We also need to disable attachment preview on a file-by-file base, as the preview doesn't work well in most cases. Our team otherwise will start to put files into Sharepoint (of all places!) and link to those from Confluence. Which would not bode well for the future of Confluence in our house and absolutely cannot be what you wanted to achieve by the better attachment integration.

Please fix this issues as soon as possible!

Definitely needed as well. We attach our process documentation that is controlled and when the preview comes up - the internal links on page 1 work but the links on the consecutive pages are inactive - this prevents the documents from being useful so the ability to skip the preview and have the documents open in Adobe Reader immediately would be the best option.

The ability to set this option on an attachment by attachment basis would probably be the best but could deal with file type as well.

Update: We got the links working on all pages but now the issue is that the preview function doesn't provide a print option. Multiple clicks to get to a point where the document can be printed. Still think the ability to disable the preview on an attachment by attachment basis would be the best option.

Relates to (or possibly a duplicate of) CONF-36899.

I definitely need this. we attach large excel spreadsheets for rosters for our field techs. The preview is completely unusable. previously clicking on the attachment opened the excel file but now it's a 2-step process for them.

We would like to disable preview on a page by page basis at minimum, optimally on a file by file basis.