Short answer. Confluence Cloud imports Google Docs directly. Start creating a page, open More actions next to the Share button, choose Templates and import, open the Import tab, pick Google Doc and authorise your account. The document arrives as a Confluence page. For a short document that really is the end of it. Shared drives, images and any document long enough to deserve more than one page are where the trouble lives.
The path that works
- Select Create in the top navigation, or the plus next to Content in the sidebar. This matters more than it sounds: the import belongs to page creation. If you are sitting in an existing page looking for an import button, you will not find one, and nothing on screen explains why.
- Next to Share, select More actions, then Templates and import.
- Open the Import tab and choose what you are bringing in: a Word document, a Google Doc or a OneDrive document.
- Authorise Google and pick the file.
- Select Finish. Each file you import becomes its own Confluence page.
Several documents can come in at once. Atlassian is explicit that the requirements differ between importing one file and importing a batch, and that they vary by document type, so the sensible move is to test with your own files rather than plan a migration around a number you read somewhere.
What the built-in import gets right
It deserves credit. There is no download, convert and re-upload dance: Confluence talks to Google directly, and the file never lands on your laptop. Body text, lists and most tables come through in a state you can work with. Bringing in a folder of separate documents, each becoming its own page, is genuinely quick. If your job is "we have forty meeting notes in Drive and they should live in the wiki", this feature does that job and you can stop reading here.
Where it breaks
| Situation | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Document on a shared drive | The picker shows your personal Drive and the document simply is not in the list. This comes up repeatedly in the Atlassian Community and there is no setting on the Confluence side that fixes it. |
| "This file can't be imported" | A flat refusal with a generic explanation about file type or permissions. Usually the wrong type, or a document you opened through a link without real access to it. |
| Images | Usually fine, sometimes not: community reports describe pictures arriving as placeholders where the image should be. Always look at the imported page before you delete anything. |
| Heading levels | The document title becomes the page title, and everything under it shifts up a level. Your Heading 2 sections arrive looking like top-level headings. |
| Shapes and drawings | Atlassian documents plainly that shapes in Word documents are replaced with placeholders. Diagrams drawn inside the document do not survive as diagrams. |
| Anything long | One file becomes one page, however long the file was. |
The failure that costs money is not the obvious one. A refused import is visible and you deal with it. A page that imported cleanly except for four missing images looks finished, gets linked from three other pages, and the gap is found by the person who needed exactly that diagram.
The .docx detour
When the Google path refuses, go around it. In Google Docs choose File, Download, Microsoft Word (.docx), then import that file through the same Import tab as a Word document. Only the .docx extension is accepted.
This is the standard answer in the community for shared drive documents, and it is worth knowing for a second reason: it gives you a file you can edit before importing. If the document needs cutting up, and long ones do, you have to be holding a file to cut it.
One file, one page, and why that hurts
Confluence Cloud creates a single page per imported document. That is fine for meeting notes and wrong for anything structured. A sixty page handbook arrives as a single page of endless scroll, with no navigation, nothing anyone can link to by section, and a table of contents that is just a list of anchors on one giant page.
The option to split a document into several pages by heading level does exist in Atlassian's own product line, but in Confluence Data Center, where the import screen offers one page or multiple pages built from heading levels. Cloud does not have that screen. People arrive from Data Center, go looking for the choice, and conclude they have missed a setting. They have not.
How long the manual way takes
Say the handbook has twenty five sections that each deserve a page. Per section: create the page, copy the section across, fix the headings that shifted, put back the images, place it in the right spot in the tree. Six to eight minutes when nothing fights back. That is roughly three hours for the document, and the part that stings is that it comes back on the next revision, because the source of truth is still the document and somebody will rewrite four sections in it next quarter.
What to do with the long ones
Two honest options. Cut the document into separate files in Word or Docs first, one per intended page, and import them as a batch: tedious but free, and completely predictable. Or use an app that does the splitting during import, which is worth it only when this happens more than once.
Disclosure: I build Word Import for Confluence, which reads the headings in a .docx and creates the page tree from them in one pass, instead of one long page. It runs inside Atlassian's own infrastructure, so the file is processed in your site and nothing is sent to me. It is an app for the structured case, and it is currently going through Marketplace review.
If your case is a folder of meeting notes, use the built-in import and spend nothing. The free path is genuinely good at the job it was built for, and most documents never need more than it.
Questions people ask
Where is the import if I am already editing a page?
It is not there. Document import happens while creating a page, through More actions, Templates and import. Editing an existing page gives you no import option, which is the single most common reason people conclude Cloud cannot import at all.
Can I import straight from a Google shared drive?
Often not. The picker tends to show the personal Drive only. Download the document as .docx and import it as a Word file.
Does the imported page stay connected to the Google Doc?
No. The import is a one-time conversion. Edits made afterwards in Google do not reach Confluence, and edits in Confluence do not reach Google. If you need the document to stay live in its original home, embed it with the Google Drive macro instead of importing it.
How many documents can I import at once?
More than one, and the requirements differ between a single import and a bulk import and depend on the document type. Atlassian says so without publishing one number that covers every case, so test on your own files before committing a migration plan to a figure.
Can I import a PDF?
Not as page content. The import handles Word, Google Docs and OneDrive documents. A PDF can be attached to a page, which is a different thing: an attachment is a file sitting on a page, not text anyone can edit or search inside the way page content is searched.
