Hi tanya.botta, I can see how this would have been confusing for users. Sorry about that. I have removed all the warnings from older versions of the docs now.

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.