Hallo Suzy and all
It's been a while since I used Confluence too. I wrote the original docs
for the Confluence Office Connector, which seem to be more or less the same
as when I last saw them, and the features described there* don't solve your
problem with templates.
Also from when I last used Confluence: The K15t team do provide an add-on
that has support for Office templates. If your client is large, it may be
worth exploring the add-on and perhaps recommending it for your Confluence
site. Here is the K15t info on their Scroll Office add-on:
https://www.k15t.com/software/scroll-office
I hope this helps.
Cheers
Sarah
* For the same of completeness, here are the Confluence docs on the Office
Connector:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf56/working-with-the-office-connector-658736947.html
- sarah
On 12 July 2016 at 20:22, Suzy Davis <suzy.davis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks Stuart
I think what you're saying is that your client is being presented with a
new editable copy of the template instead. Is that right?
Yes – correct.
They deploy docx files – saved as Read Only, and they are forced to “save
as” with a new name.
It’s kind of crazy that these programs – and SharePoint included – don’t
leverage the power of MS Office better – the developers of these intranet
environments don’t seem to understand the power of templates.
Thanks for the reminder about the Doc Properties prompt – for anyone who’s
searching for it, in 2013 it’s under the Developer tab > Document Panel and
check the checkbox “Always show Document Information panel …”
The Author field will automatically populate the registered user in MS
Word. That helps a little, but the author would still need to add in their
title each time.
Sadly without the file being a dotm or docm you can’t add in a macro to
process the DocProperty info more usefully. I would need the IT
department - who are flat out and really stretched to allocated some time
– to do something that is outside their expertise when they have so many
other things to deal with. Changing the image to include addins that can
handle some automatic processing would be optimal – but I think unlikely at
this stage.
I was hoping that at a minimum they could run a template from the Intranet
which would at least enable them to leverage Building Blocks…. But alas,
it’s a dream J
Kind regards Suzy
*Suzy Davis *
*Microsoft Word Templates, Apps for Microsoft Office*
*& Documentation Projects*
*www.**appsforoffice <http://www.appsforoffice.com/>**.com*
PO Box 404
Brighton VIC 3186
(Melbourne) Australia
*Email* suzy.davis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
*From:* austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Stuart Burnfield
*Sent:* Tuesday, 12 July 2016 4:45 PM
*To:* austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* atw: Re: FW: Templates on Atlassian Confluence
Hi Suzy. Yes this is ringing faint bells from a contract with a bank about
8 years ago. I redid their templates and made them available through
Sharepoint, which they were dipping their toes into.
I think whether it's Confluence or Sharepoint you publish the Word
template as an attachment to a page. The user opens the page and then
clicks the attachment to open a working copy in Word that they can update
and save.
Ideally the thing that gets opened is a new Word document based on the
template. I think what you're saying is that your client is being presented
with a new editable copy of the template instead. Is that right?
In a template you can specify a dialog that pops up to prompt for some
starter information such as title, project and status. The user fills in
the blanks and clicks OK to populate the new document with these fields,
which are probably displayed in the cover page and headers/footers.
Is it possible to attach an action or macro to that OK button in the
initial pop-up dialog? It could be as simple as opening the Save As dialog
with the Type set to Word Document instead of Word Template.
Sorry to be vague. This was a while ago and these Word features may well
have changed for better or worse since then.
--- Stuart
