Info type: How-to
Applies to: Microsoft Word on an Office 365 subscription, plus Atlassian Confluence.
Good for: When your organisation has Confluence and yet you're forced to create a Word document.
Assumes: Basic familiarity with Confluence, Word and Office 365.

Got Atlassian Confluence, but you’re forced to collaborate on a Microsoft Word file? Here’s how to minimise the pain and stay sane.

I focus on Microsoft Word .docx files in this article, but many of the same points apply to other programs and file formats too.

The value of Confluence for collaborative writing

Confluence makes collaborative writing easier, in large part because it is a synchronous ‘online’ environment. This affords many benefits that don’t apply in asynchronous ‘offline’ environments (such as when people circulate Microsoft Word files as email attachments).

For example, each participant can see and respond to each other’s comments in real-time — and be notified of changes and ‘@mentions’, automatically. Thus it is easy to keep everyone in sync with the latest information — which is half of the battle.

But these benefits really only come to the fore because of an even more important point about the online environment of Confluence. That is, all collaborators work on the same single instance of a document by default (though it may be comprised of numerous individual pages within Confluence).

Having such a single source of the truth is invaluable. It cuts out many causes of frustration and wasted effort that are practically inevitable otherwise.

• There is no doubt as to which file contains the latest iteration of the document.
• Everyone who needs to can easily find and work on the latest iteration, at any time.
• It is easier to reach consensus, because everyone is up to date and able to react and converse in real-time.

When you’re forced to work in Microsoft Word you lose most of these benefits.

The trouble with Microsoft Word and ‘collaboration by email’

You start a document in Word. You slave over the first draft. You send it out as an email attachment to get input. And… the email thread blows up with contradictory feedback, obscure discussions, ambiguous requests and various edited copies of your attachment.

How much fun do you have sorting that lot out?

1. Answer A: It’s a barrel of laughs — let’s do it again soon.
2. Answer B: It’s a royal pain in the neck — let’s please find a better way.

I very much doubt that you feel drawn to Answer A. So, let’s agree that ‘collaboration by email attachment’ is a bad method and that we’d all be much better off with a more efficient alternative.

There are also other difficulties that are fundamental to work based on binary file types such as Microsoft Word .docx files. But that’s a subject for another time.

How Confluence can make Word more bearable and replace email

If you have Confluence then of course it’d be better to draft your documents there rather than in Word. But if you really must use Word at some point, then you should at least take advantage of some handy features in Confluence to create a process that is less fraught with difficulty.

You want to encourage a culture in which people don’t make and circulate copies of documents. Rather, they should direct all their efforts at a single master copy (remember, you want a single source of the truth at all times).

Confluence can help to facilitate this as it offers:

• An environment that makes it easy to find the master copy and to have conversations over it.
• Automatic version control features — so you can always review or retrieve earlier iterations of your document if necessary.
• Co-authoring features via Office 365 (if you have it) — so that multiple contributors can edit the document at the same time.

For the most part this is all easy to use in Confluence. But there some pitfalls to avoid and good practices to know — which is what the rest of this article is about.

Prepare and upload the document

1. Prepare the document for version control.

Get the document ready to upload. In particular, make sure that the file name of the document is ‘Web safe’.

2. Create a new Confluence page.

To use the file versioning features in Confluence, you need to attach your file to a Confluence page. So, create a new Confluence page somewhere sensible, in the usual way.

Always make it easy for contributors to find things and to understand what’s what:

• Give the new page a title that clearly relates to the file (or files) that you’re about to attach.
• It’s a good idea to make a note in the new page, like “See Attachments, and edit the work-in-progress (WIP) version via the Edit in Office link.” (you’ll see why later in this article).

Save the new page.

3. Attach the .docx file to the new page.

From the new page, go to the menu (ellipsis button) and select Attachments. This is where you will find the file in future, after you’ve uploaded it in a moment.

Use the functions on the Attachments page to upload (and thus ‘attach’) your document. You can browse and select your document file, or you can drag and drop — and Confluence will give you a chance to add some extra information.

Edit the version-controlled document

1. Edit the master copy only, online.

Click on Edit in Office. Your web browser will prompt you for a confirmation or two, and then your file should open directly in Microsoft Word.

Only by doing it this way will you be able to (a) save directly to the version controlled master copy and thus maintain your single source of the truth, and (b) have access to the co-authoring feature.

2. Edit the document.

Edit as normal, within the co-authoring environment.

How to send a copy for review by email (if you really, really must)

Come review time, the best thing by far is to continue as I explained above. If at all possible, discourage copies and direct everyone’s attention to the master copy in Confluence at all times.

It is in everyone’s interests to work with the master copy as the only copy. Encourage your contributors and reviewers to keep all the action in this one place — educate them on the procedure and its benefits, and make the document easy to find (don’t hesitate to share the appropriate URL, even if you think that people shouldn’t need help to get to the right bit of Confluence).

However… in practice, in spite of all our best efforts to avoid ‘collaboration by email attachment’, the culture and demands of your workplace may yet force you into it at some point.

Thus you’ll be forced to go ‘old school’ and deviate from the single source of the truth methodology after all. Groan!

However, hopefully by this point you’ve cleared most of the hurdles and you only need to circulate the document for approval. Still, the document may yet elicit more feedback than you had hoped would be necessary. So, I suggest you do as follows to pre-empt this and keep some sanity:

1. Download a copy to circulate.

Go to the Attachments page as before, but this time click on the filename (to download a copy of the document file to your computer).

2. Append the version number to the filename.

Manually append the file version number^† to the filename of the downloaded copy. For example, X123_PascalCaseFileName_v3.docx.

Do this so that even if (when) there is confusion later, at least you can check your Sent mail folder later to remind yourself of which version of the master copy you originally shared! This can make it a little easier to unpick a mess when people return edited copies that are out of sync with changes to your master copy.

3. Circulate the copy (and freeze the master copy).

Write your email, attach the copy of the document file and circulate in the usual, traditional way.

If possible, ‘freeze’ activity on your master copy at this point so that it does not get out of sync with the copy you circulated. Out-of-sync changes tend to complicate things further, so if you can, wait until you’ve collated all feedback.

When you have participants who edit isolated copies of the document it can get messy, fast. Do what you can to limit the worst excesses. Good luck!

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This article is a substantial rewrite of an earlier version first published 2019/09/23 under the title “Use Confluence to version control Office documents — best practices”.