Overwrite Page Content Between Versions
Imagine you have completed a significant rewrite on an article or have fixed a lot of broken content. If you have saved multiple versions of the article, updating each version manually can be quite time-consuming. However, with the Scroll Documents overwrite feature, this process becomes much simpler and more efficient.
How Does It Work?
The overwrite feature enables you to replace the content of a page with the content from the same page in any other version.
You can always revert overwritten content by accessing the page history of the overwritten page and restoring it to the revision before the new content was added.
Here is how it works:
Content | Will this content get overwritten? | What happens when I overwrite this content? |
|---|---|---|
Paragraph content | Yes | The text content from the source page will replace all text content on the target page. |
Page title | No | The page title of the target page will not be overwritten by the page title from the source page. |
Attachments | Partially ⚠️ | The attachments on the target page will be removed from the editor and page views, but the original attachment will remain in the attachment section of the page. Any new attachments added via the overwrite feature will be be added in both the editor and the attachment section. |
Macros | Yes | Any macros present on the target page will be removed upon overwriting. If the source page contains any macros, those will be added into the page you are overwriting. If the source page contains any Include Page, Excerpt Include, or MultiExcerpt Include macro you’ll have the option to resolve these macros during the overwrite process. |
Links | Yes | Any links on the target page will be removed and replaced with the content from the source page. If the source page has external and internal links, those will be added to the target page. When copying internal links between versions, they will be automatically transformed to direct to the corresponding page within the same version, if the page is present in that version. If you copy an internal link to a version where the linked page does not exist, the link will direct back to the linked page in the source version. |
Things to keep in mind
Even though the process of copying content is relatively straightforward, there are certain points and limitations that need to be taken into consideration before using the feature:
Page existence: The page you are copying content from must exist in both the source version and the target version.
This feature cannot create new pages between versions.
Single version update: Content can only be overwritten from one page to one version at a time.
Cannot be used for merging: The feature always overwrites all content of a page. It’s not possible to only overwrite specific sections of a page, thus we do not consider this a merge feature.
How To Overwrite Content
To overwrite content from one page version to another, follow these steps:
Click on Compare versions, either via the Document toolbox or in the Document Manager.
To locate the Document Manager:
Navigate to the Confluence side bar and click on Scroll Documents.
Select the relevant document from the Document Library; this action will direct you to the Document Manager.
In the Compare versions dialog, locate the updated page in the page tree on the left-hand side.
Set the pickers to display the correct versions (as well as variants and languages, if enabled).
Click on one of the arrows (<< >>) to choose which direction you want to overwrite content:
Open overwrite right to left dialog
Open overwrite left to right dialog
Carefully read through the dialog to understand which page you are about to overwrite and which page you are copying content from.
Finally, click Overwrite to replace the content on the target page.