Create Articles with Microsoft Word Add-in - is it working for you?

Jayne Loh · ‎10-31-2023

We are looking at ways of improving how we can involve authors in Knowledge Authoring, one challenge we constantly face is the the ease of use of the text editor and very often articles are authored in Word Doc and uploaded by the knowledge managers.

If you have this add-in enabled, how is this working for you? Is it effective and easy to use?

Any disadvantages of using this add-in?

Mike Van Vooren · ‎10-31-2023

@Jayne Loh - I agree that the limitations and ease of use with the TinyMCE editor are one of the low points working with knowledge articles. There are plugins that the TinyMCE product offers, including one that allows copying and pasting from Word a lot better, which ServiceNow does not use.

As for the Word add-in, we have been unable to use it. It is a great concept but has some dealbreaker limitations for us. First, you must use Word Online (not locally installed Word). That may have changed, but I believe that is still the case. Second, you must always use the add-in if you want to make updates to the article. You are not able to use the native Editor on the platform once you have created an article using the add-in. Finally, you are limited to using the "Standard" template for your articles. In our case, we use the "KCS Article" and "FAQ" templates for a majority of our articles. The add-in does not support using those.

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Joachim V_ · ‎06-14-2024

@Jayne Loh We're currently evaluating the word plugin use. You can see the code and edit the article in TinyMCE though when you "Unlink from Word". Yet I assume it's not meant for co-editing as TinyMCE has a hard time dealing with the comprehensive HTML code that comes through the Word plugin.

Also re-connection is possible when you open the Word file in its location (you have to know which it is) and navigate in the plugin to the article (by number) and in the upcoming question select "Replace"

Nevertless in our case the layout is mashed up even after a minor edit in TinyMCE. This makes is not useful (unless maybe the formatting is done by CSS as described by @DavidBReynolds in this article Configuring Knowledge Management - Add-in for Micr... - ServiceNow Community , post from 2023-04-05. @DavidBReynolds I still try to figure out how to configure this).

For us currently a showstopper is that we will introduce dynamic translation which will automatically generate localized articles (by a machine translation backend) and the response from the translation does not fit always but is not reasonably editable (the translated articles don't have Word files related to them).

Trevor Petrie · ‎08-27-2024

We are also evaluating this add-in at present but as others have mentioned, the limitations appear to outweigh the benefits. I couldn't imagine introducing this add-in into our environment in it's present form. Not being able to use our current templates is a deal-breaker, as is introducing articles with a completely different style-set.

Does anyone happen to know if the add-in is being actively developed, or if there is somewhere to make suggestions for improvements?

Andrew64 · ‎08-28-2024

The Ideas portal has a few Ideas for this. Go into it and upvote those that would help.
Ideas - Now Support (servicenow.com)