MS Word Importer: Status History

Below is the history of changes to this idea's status. Return to the idea.

  • Under Community Review

    We are aware that many customers do content entry by copy-pasting from MS Word documents (which may have already gone through an authoring/approval workflow outside of Tridion).

    So, something like an MS Word Import option seems like an obvious thing to have, but Mark Saunders nicely summarizes the complexity of generalizing and productizing such a thing. Indeed, we have had a MS Word Connector in the past, but it was functionally quite limited (assuming a form-like document structure) and didn't get used a lot in practice.

    There has also been an initiative to create a very flexible and powerful successor which could handle so-called Compound Documents: a Word Document which is made up of several (linked) Components.  This was never released because it became too complex.

    So, the idea makes a lot of sense, but we would have to get clarity on what the "sweet spot" would be: just enough flexibility to be useful for many customers/implementation.

    Some additional questions to get clarity on the scope:

    * Are there more people who remember the original MS Word Connector and issues with using it in an implementation?

    * What about embedded images in Rich Text Fields?

    * MS Word documents can be semi-structured (using headings which delineate sections).  Should it be possible to map this to nested fields or even separate linked Components?

    * We are aware of customers who prepare an entire Page layout (incl. content) in a MS Word document, so the Word Document translates to a Page plus multiple Component (Presentations). Is this a common practice?

  • New

    No note was provided with this status update.