Simple Table for Confluence – How Are You Using It for Projects, Reports, etc?

[Mia Tamm]

Hello Confluence Community! 👋

I recently came across the Simple Table for Confluence app and am excited about how it supercharges Confluence tables. I’d love to hear how others are using it – what are your use cases or tips?

For those unfamiliar, Simple Table is an Atlassian Marketplace app that turns raw data (CSV, JSON, Excel) or even regular Confluence tables into interactive, in-page tables with extra capabilities. It’s built on Atlassian Forge (meaning no data leaves Confluence, so your info stays secure) and it feels like a native Confluence feature. Even non-technical users can leverage features like sorting, filtering, custom formatting, and adding calculated columns or summary totals – all without any coding needed. You can import data from files or simply wrap an existing Confluence table to instantly upgrade it with these features (preserving the ability to edit it in-place).

Some cool use cases I’m exploring with Simple Table:

• Project Tracking & Task Boards: We’ve wrapped our team’s Confluence task/status table with Simple Table and it instantly became an interactive status board. Now we can sort tasks by due date, filter by status, and even see aggregated counts per status – all right on the page without exporting to spreadsheets. We still edit the table directly in Confluence as usual, but now teammates can toggle filters or sorting to focus on what’s important. It’s been great for our weekly project updates and has cut down the manual reordering of tasks.

• Reporting & Dashboards: Simple Table lets us pull in data for reports (e.g. a monthly KPI Excel sheet or a JSON data export) and display it with proper formatting and live calculations. For instance, our finance team attaches their monthly Excel report to a Confluence page, and the app automatically parses and displays it as a Confluence table with sortable columns and filters – no manual copy-paste needed. We can even add footer aggregations (totals, averages, counts) to track KPIs directly within the page. This has made our dashboards truly dynamic and always up-to-date (just update the attachment, and the Confluence table updates too), which is super useful for quick reporting.

• Visual Organization & Formatting: The app also helps make tables more readable and visually organized. You can customize column styles (like bold/italic text or alignment) to highlight key info and improve readability. For example, we applied bold styling to the “Status” column to flag items like “Over Budget” vs “On Track,” and right-aligned all our numeric budget columns for a cleaner look. Little touches like that make a big difference. You can even group rows by a category to create collapsible sections with sub-totals (similar to pivot tables) for better visual organization of large data sets. All of this happens inside Confluence, which has helped turn raw data into something our team can scan and understand at a glance.

Those are just a few scenarios I’ve tried or thought about. Now I’d love to hear from you: if you’re using Simple Table for Confluence, what do you use it for? How has it helped your team – whether for project tracking, task management, reporting, visual organization, or something totally different? Any creative use cases or favorite features to share?

Thanks in advance! Looking forward to learning how others are leveraging this app. 🙏

— Mia Tamm from Simpleasyty