Import an FAQ from a spreadsheet into Confluence Cloud

Route 1: paste the rows as a table on a page

Open the sheet, select the cells including the header row, copy, and paste into a Confluence page. The editor turns the cells into a Confluence table. (Check with one row first.) That is the whole import. It is quick, needs no app, and anyone with edit rights can do it.

What you give up: the result is a table, not a set of questions. People cannot search an answer separately from the page, cannot mark which answer solved their problem, and the table grows harder to read with every row. Long answers with formatting or links usually need cleaning up after the paste. For a short, stable FAQ (say under 30 rows) this is often all you need.

Route 2: import the CSV into a Q&A space

If the FAQ is meant to keep growing, with people asking new questions and answers being improved over time, each row is better off as a question of its own. Full disclosure: Dortus makes AskSpace, a Q&A app for Confluence Cloud, and this route describes its CSV import. There are other Q&A apps on the Atlassian Marketplace; the general idea is the same, the column names differ.

In AskSpace, a space admin opens Space settings, then Integrations, then AskSpace, and chooses Import questions, then Simple CSV. The file needs a first row with these column names:

title, details, answer, asked_by, answered_by, asked_at, tags

Only title is required; every other column may be empty. One row is one question. A filled-in answer becomes the best answer of that question, so an FAQ imports as a list of solved questions. asked_by and answered_by are plain names, not accounts. A template file with two example rows can be downloaded in the import dialog.

Three things to get right in the sheet before you export it as CSV:

• Dates. Write asked_at as 2024-03-05. Dates with slashes are read as month/day unless another date in the file shows day/month (such as 25/03/2024); ISO dates avoid the guesswork.
• Tags. Separate tags with a semicolon or a comma. A question keeps at most three tags; extra ones are dropped and the preview tells you.
• Duplicates. A row with the same title, details, asked_by and asked_at as an earlier row is skipped, with a note (even if the answer differs).

Before anything is written, the import shows a preview: how many questions will be created, which rows have a problem and why. After the import, it is listed under Recent imports with an Undo, so a wrong file is one click to reverse. Text in details and answer is imported as plain text; attachments cannot travel in a CSV.

Exporting the CSV from Excel or Google Sheets

In Excel: File, Save As, and choose CSV UTF-8. In Google Sheets: File, Download, Comma Separated Values. Keep the header row and remove any title rows above it. Use the column names above; they are not case-sensitive and "asked by" also works, but copying them exactly is safest. If a cell contains line breaks or commas, that is fine: both tools quote those cells on export.

Short answers

Can I import the answer and the question in one row? Yes. In the Simple CSV format, the answer column becomes the best answer of that row's question.

What if my sheet has more columns? Extra columns are ignored. Only the seven names above are read.

Can I undo an import? Yes, from Recent imports in the AskSpace settings of that space.

Who can import? Space admins only.

Questions

Something on this page out of date? Email support@dortus.com.