Import knowledge articles

[suha2]

Hi All,

To see the  articles imported from Word, or copy/paste from Word (even when "keep formatting":) that do not maintain a clean format in the article.  The is consistent issues with numbered lists and bullet point lists aligning text.  

Does anyone have suggestions, tips or instructions on how to maintain the formatting from Word docs?

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @suha2 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/knowledge-management-articles/options-for-importing-external-ar...

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0830666

[suha2]

Hi, 

How can we import articles with Document like pdf?

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @suha2 

Check out these recent threads that cover this topic.

For ServiceNow, you have a couple of options:

1. Upload PDF and import it into ServiceNow. (Formatting usually doesn't stay the way you want it when you do this, particularly with tables and images.)

2. Convert PDF to Word and import the Word doc. (You'll have the same issues with formatting, particularly charts and images.)

3. Do some copy/pasting with the text; import the images (if any exist) into the Media Library and then insert the images into your article - don't copy/paste them into your article. 

This last method seems to be the agreed upon best method, even though it is more laborious. 

This is because you can better control the coding on the back end (keep your HTML clean - which will make it easier to edit in the future) and you can better control the formatting.

These threads sort of go over a lot of the how-to and they why. I also offer some how-to guides in these threads:

Best way to import PPT files (applies to Word and PDF, too)

Discussion about importing bulk files (read through all the replies - good discussion)

There are probably other related threads, too. This topic comes up a lot in forums, because there's just no easy way to import lots of knowledge at once and have it come out clean formatting-wise. If you take the time to import articles correctly, your articles look great, they function great, and you can edit them more easily without your code breaking later on. 

If you just import stuff up into ServiceNow, you'll spend as much time fixing it later as you would have if you just used the copy/paste method to begin with. (Assuming you guys are wanting to stick with some sort of consistent formatting. If you don't care how it looks and you just want it up there, importing may work for you.)

https://www.servicenow.com/community/knowledge-managers/how-to-create-knowledge-articles-from-pdf-co...

[dgarad]

Hi @suha2 

When you import an article from a Word file formatting does not remain as same so you need to manually formatting.