After the welcome news that the View Excel macro will continue to be supported, users of that macro may wish to vote for this related bug fix:

CONFSERVER-31741

Wonderful news!Unable to render embedded object: File (  This is one of the most important features to many of our users) not found.  Thank you for listening!

I am concerned that this just means fixing bugs and maintaining the plugins and not adding new features, but at least it ensures that it will keep working with the latest versions of Confluence. Its a step in the right direction, because frankly abandoning it would have been a big slap in the face to the enterprise customers who bought Confluence based on this feature.

Excellent, thanks for hearing our comments!

PERFECT!!!!

Absolutely briljant, even though it took more than 3 years to decide.

Thank you for reconsidering your decision. You have made many people happy as we have been living for about six months without it and get many comments from team members wishing it was available.  

Thanks for listening, Atlassian!!!

Thanks People, it is important to continue with this Macro!

Really a useful Feature for all of us. Great that it will be supported further

Thank you so much - you made my day

Great news!

Great! Now try to optimize / enhance the presentation of files embedded by these macros in Confluence.

Thank you for listening! Keep up the good work maintaining useful features.

Good decision!

Thumbs up! And please make a habit of listening to your users. There are a lot of other longstanding issues users deem important and keep getting ignored in favor of the next fancy new feature.

Awesome - what great news to hear!

AMAZING NEWS!!! Thank you, Atlassian, for listening!!

Yes!!  Thank you Rachel and Atlassian, and thanks to all fellow customers (like me) who chimed in respectfully with their thoughts on this issue. 

Hi everyone, thanks for all your feedback. I'm closing this issue, as we've decided to reverse our decision to stop supporting these macros. 

Please see the update in the description for more information. 

Please realize that this is one of the biggest reasons that people might want to go to Confluence over another system such as SharePoint. The ability to take your current documentation and bring it in and be viewable and searchable without having to rewrite it all as native Confluence pages is vital. You will shoot yourself in the foot if you remove these macros.

These macros are still valuable even with the new preview functionality. Instead of removing these macros you should update them such that they are based on the new preview functionality and can use a common code base making them easier to maintain. This is especially important with Excel documents. The current preview functionality does not do a good job with sheets. It just renders the document like one long multi-page document. There are many case though where you would want to show your audience just one sheet for instance and the Excel macro does just that.

Please keep this macro Atlassian! It's a vital macro when working with and interfacing to office documents.

likewise, we use the Office Excel File Macro for our workflow to update and communicate casual roster times weeks ahead on the On-Prem server solution we are moving away from to Cloud solution.

This has cause a massive amount of administration overhead as I have to engineer a new process and way to update and communicate this type of information.

Please leave the Office Excel Macro the way it is in on-prem server 6.11 - If you are going to provide good user experience, then don't change it yet until you have a mature product that doesn't send your paying customers and users back to version 1.0 of Confluence

Please keep this feature.

I agree a lot with what has been said above.  I had planned and developed a complete workflow for our project team based on embedding excel tabs (Sheets).  This feature is so useful as it allows to implement some kind of a MVC model.  Confluence is used as configurable "Views" and "Layout" on specific Excel contents.  Excel works as an active "controller" with all its crunching power : can compute stats, graphs, process some logic and offer the results to Confluence to "Render" it.  I was very disappointed (not to say highly frustrated) when I read that it would not be there in the future.  The advantage of concentrating information within on Excel file with many tabs, is that it allows only one single point of access (the Excel file) to relate information together :  in the case of our team, we put all the information related to a project in it.  We then can send it, or copy it as a template and reuse the whole worksheet setup.  I anticipate a strong reaction from my team members announcing this very bad news.

I hope this functionality is kept and expanded - I routinely use a large excel workbook with different sheets displayed across multiple pages as a requirements document / API spec for several teams. It's much easier to update and publish into one place rather than having to update several pages - and it can also be exported and sent to the other business teams who are not yet Agile or on Confluence etc. Having this as a a basic view only of a workbook of 30+sheets is extremely limited. 

Please save this macros!!!

I thought I would share with the user community concerned about this issue what I just heard today from Atlassian support concerning a fix for a crucial bug 31741 affecting the Excel macro, outstanding since 2015:

"There isn't a roadmap/ETA decided for the bug report or a plan to fix it in the next 12 months".

Haven't actively used confluence for 2+ years. 

Here I am bragging to my co-workers how confluence can display Excel files only to find out that it was to be replaced by some dumbed down thumbmail version.

Please keep this useful Macro. Applies to all MS files.

I'm with the others - please save these macros! They are far superior to thumbnails in look and feel.  One team here in particular routinely employs the attachment method and downloading them all the time has been a huge pain point for users and proven a real barrier to confluence buy in.

DITTO!!!!  I use this all the time for mapping documents tied to tickets.  Using just an attachment forces us to download the file, open, edit, save and upload again.  Who wants to do all those steps when we can just open the sheet from the page, edit and save?  I've tried the picture thing and it's not very useful at all.

We have raised it with our TAM numerous times.

The only solution that is possible to implement is to store MS Documents in SharePoint Online and use SharePoint Online add-on by Communardo.

Also this is not something that everyone can have and afford.

For me this feature should remain and be supported.

Agreed.  The "replacement" of thumbnails is terrible. 

("When inserting a file into your page, you can choose to show it as a thumbnail or as a link. ")

First of all it's a picture and not an actual html table on the page and secondly it is unreadable.  When you try to resize it, the "image" just blurs out.  

I add my vote to the previous comments asking to keep and improve on the current functionality - especially when it comes to displaying Excel files.

This is one of the key features to convince many team members in using Confluence as the main (or only) collaboration platform.

Thank you. 

If you want to improve on the functionality, that would be great.  This is a step backwards.  We want to display the content on the page in an easily readable way.  For example, we have to make status reports in Excel because emailed Confluence pages don't look good.  We want the status reports to be easily viewable while in Confluence.  The thumbnail and preview aren't sufficient - we want to display the Excel content as a page.

I'm trying to drive people into Confluence.  Please don't make this harder by putting up road blocks and removing functionality.

If anything, improve the existing macro - Please make the "Edit Document" link optional via a checkbox in the macro.

+1 TL:DR: I echo a lot of the foregoing comments in support of keeping the view file macros and whinge at the 'new' view file scrolling pane implementation.
I'm glad to hear the macros aren't going away, but the replacement is a red-headed stepchild to the original view file functionality that embeds / display the file. I'm not clear on  the business case to 'dumb-down' the view file functionality to a scrolling view pane. It appears you got the message not to remove view file entirely, but you still don't seem to fully comprehend the use cases for not messing with the original functionality. Your user base is looking for a better way to organize and link data. The LAN drive is dead, and Confluence is a reasonably nice Content Management System replacement, so why mess with success?

Hi Rachel @rrobins,  please change the 'type' field of this ticket to something which better reflects the urgency of this matter. (e.g. Request). The term 'suggestion' does not really reflect the urgency of this request appropriately.

Also you may want to link CONFSERVER-52299 to this ticket, as it sounds to me that it is a prequisite to fix the Firefox office connectivity first before the office macros can be continuously provided and supported.

(PS:  @mention does not seem to work in this Jira instance????)

Hi jan.priebe, Are your 10k users all IE users?  As far as I'm aware, the referred functionality is broken to FF users since the Firefox Quantum release. (there is a separate ticket CONFSERVER-52299 on this matter, but little likelihood to get it addressed by Atlassian soon)

Apparently deprecated does not mean removed. The macros still work in our 6.6.1 instance of server.

We also need this basic functionality: Displaying a spreadsheet "as is" directly in and alongside the pages content, with a one-click EDIT solution. Taking this away will be a major bummer in the user's support of Confluence. 

We are working on Confluence 5.10.8 wiht 10,000 users, many of them using the Excel macros, as we still need excel sheets to be presented this way. The edit in office function is most convenient when this macro is used, as people can just click the edit link on the page after they have seen the excel content embedded. Every other option is much more confusing to non key users. If this is getting removed, we would have one more argument on the pro side for using office 365 as our collaboration platform rather than Confluence.

What will happen to the existing macros that are used? Will they display an macro error? Or do you plan something else that will be automatically transform the existing ones?

I have a lot of customers complaining about this issue as they have thousands of pages and blogposts where they used those macros and are afraid of getting errors.

Adding another user scenario to this as well. The current Excel macro does not work well because it distorts the formatting, as others have mentioned. The options of displaying the content as a link will not work in all cases - I need to content displayed in the page so that users see it without clicking away. And the option of displaying a thumbnail doesn't work either, because the preview only shows the excel file in 8x11 views like a document, not like a spreadsheet. Our dev team uses SharePoint as a file mgmt option and is very heavily document-based. We need a way to seamlessly integrate Office docs into the wiki so we can have one shared experience across the company. 

Natalie S. and the others have explained it very well. 

Office Excel, Office Word, Office Power Point macros are extremely useful for us and if they are removed without a user friendly alternative, our confluence user experience will be seriously diminished to the point that we may not be able to use it.

Please don't replace it.  At least until the new File View Macro is in par with the functionality of the Office Connector

Thanks.

What will replace the Office macro? Will there be any other (built in) function similar to Office macro at all?

kbarton1, you don't speak for me.

It makes sense to replace these since the current versions are pretty unusable since they distort the formatting so badly in most cases that the content is unreadable but... WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?!?!?!?! The attitude of "we'll fix it for cloud and eventually it will roll down to server users" flies in the face of the core value of "don't *&%#$ the customer". I know I speak for all server users when we say we've been getting *$&^#ed for years and we're sick of it. 

We have 1000 anonymous users and a large number of licenced users. Our instance (server v5.9.7) has dozens of spaces and hundreds of pages, many of these using Office View Word, Excel, and PDF macros.
We are in the middle of migrating hundreds of procedure documents for the anonymous end users to access.

This ticket/announcement has been open for almost two years now without an indication of what the new solution will be or if it will be a simillar in-line macro.
 Super frustrating and leaving us to instead look into other options rather than Confluence.
Obviously, this is another vote to cancel the removal of Office View macros, and a request for more frequent updates from Atlassian on the planned (inline) solution. 

+1 for the comments above. Without the ability to view the contents of an Office doc, not a thumbnail, we will be forced to go MS Sharepoint. This should be a no-brainer for the Atlassian team.

Same thoughts here: Especially the Excel Macro is still in use and needed in future as well. The preview is no real alternative in many cases. As for Word, PDF and Powerpoint, we do not see big disadvantages when these related macros will not be available. But the Excel Macro must stay please. 

The presence of this macros was one of the reasons to go for Confluence in my company. Without it the usability of Confluence drops dramatically. Thumbnail is not the same as viewer! In my company we use excel file as databases with info about projects and I have displayed certain bits on Confluence pages. How am I supposed to do that with thumbnails? And apart from that specific case, it is worrying that Atlassian is removing a useful feature without providing a real alternative. How am I to trust Atlassian and invest my precious time and my money to implement it if after another pivot whole thing can go down the sewer?!

This is very useful and important built-in macro that shouldn't be removed at all. Pls. reconsider to keep this macro. 

if the viewer macros for Excel, PDF, Powerpoint are no longer available this is a reason for me not to buy atlassian.

Office documents are the most frequent input for us and a straight and BIG display in the wiki is the main advantage compared to sharepoint.

if this advantage is lost we rather go for another product.

I totally agree, too – please cancel this withdrawal to Confluence Server too... And thanks Atlassian for listening, it's much appreciated!

Hi folks, thanks for updating the issue with information on the new approach. 

Ditto @AukeMiedema and @SteveBakker.  What about server customers?

My client's project has been delayed a year (due to various priority changes) but it is about to be picked up again and the availability of this for server is going to be huge factor on whether we decide to use Confluence or not to deploy the technical content.

Please provide an indication because this is critical for us.

I must commend Atlassian for listening to their customers and changed course.  While this is good news for cloud users, please don't forget us server users too.

I agree with Steven Bakker, cloud is own thing, when can we expect an update about this functionality on the server? 

So this has been rolled back for the Cloud version (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-39829), which is nice, but will the same be done for us CONFSERVER folks?

The new thumbnail view is a big downgrade in functionality I often used the old viewxls and the result is not comparable!

Please restore the functionality as soon as possible!

I would also like to see this function retained.

Please add me to the people requesting this functionality be retained. The add file functionality, and the thumbnail rendering is a serious downgrade in functionality. In our case Excel spreadsheets can be easily displayed and edited. That is not the case with "Add File". Thanks.

Another vote to retain this functionality.

This is not a good solution to confluence. Many people in my organisations use this macro on daily basis. 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.

I'm disappointed to see the excel macro function being removed.  This is one of my favorite and we have quite a few of these being used on our confluence page.  It's more convenient to use this macro to update excel file rather than using the View File function where you need to download the file somewhere, then make changes, save and upload a new version.

Please bring it back!

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.