Import Microsoft Word documents overview

You can use the Import from Word (or Word Import) feature to convert existing specification content, such as requirements or test cases, written in a Word document into a Polarion LiveDoc Document. This allows your organization to take advantage of Polarion's process automation and management capabilities, while retaining the familiarity and ease of use of a simple desktop-based office document for authors.

By bringing the content of your Microsoft Word documents into Polarion, your authors give up very little in terms of how they write and format content, and your organization gains much in terms of efficient and controlled process, full-lifecycle traceability, transparency, and team collaboration and communication. Remember that after a Microsoft Word document is imported, you can always export it back to its original format to work on it offline, or enable others to do so using the Round-trip for Microsoft Word feature.

Let's take a moment for a brief overview of this functionality. A typical, but by no means the only use case is to bring existing requirements specifications into Polarion. In so doing, you can have Polarion automatically differentiate between document content that is just general information, and content that should be recognized as requirement type Work Items which can be tracked, assigned, planned, managed with workflow, and linked for traceability across functional boundaries such as Quality Assurance and Development.

This automatic recognition can be based on keywords in the Microsoft Word document, or on styles defined and applied in the document such as bullet, heading, and paragraph styles, or some combination of both of these. Keywords can also serve as triggers for actions specified in import rules and applied to recognized Work Items. For example, the word must in your document might the trigger for an action to set a value in the Severity field to must have or any value defined in the project configuration for that field. You define Work Item recognition Rules using easy-to-understand graphical controls when you import a Microsoft Word document into Polarion as a LiveDoc Document.

You can save any set of rules you define as an Import Configuration which you can then quickly apply to other documents when you import them, so you only need to define Work Item recognition rules for similar documents once. You can of course have multiple Import Configurations for different types of documents. For example, you might have one set of rules in an Import Configuration which you apply only when importing software requirements specifications, and another when importing functional requirements specifications, and yet another for test case specifications.

Important compatibility and other notes