Leverage "Template Variables" to streamline document generation

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The Challenge with Copy and Paste

As someone who writes a lot of documents that follow similar, if not identical format, the appeal of Confluence's Duplicate feature is strong. However, this leads to a not-insignificant amount of time searching for text that will need to be swapped out.

One great example would be a contract. Duplicating helps to get most of the structure correct, but it would be incredibly important to ensure the correct parties are named.

This is where Confluence Templates, but more importantly Template Variables come into play. Template Variables let you define specific spots that you want your users to input data, and prompt them for this data right when the Confluence page gets created.

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Types of Variables

Template Variables come in three flavours:

1. Plain Text
2. Multi-Line Text
3. List

What does this mean?

Plain Text Variables

Plain text variables can hold plain text. This could be the name of a customer, a deadline date, or a dollar figure.

Multi-line Text Variables

Multi-line text variables are great for longer inputs such as mailing addressees.

List Variables

List variables provide a selection of entries that can be chosen from, which is good if you need to control the value in some way. Maybe this is a period of time (5 days, 15 days, etc) or a currency (USD, CAD, GBP, etc).

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If you want to re-use these variables across your document, you can copy and paste them wherever you desire. Once one is populated, every variable with the same name will be populated with the same information.

This is such a powerful feature that lets you upgrade your reusable templates. I'd love to hear of other unique ways that variables are being used to streamline your business.

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[Andrew Zimmerman]

Nice article and video, @Robert DaSilva! You touched on this a bit at the end of the video regarding placement of the variables, but I was curious if you'd recommend placing ALL the variables at the very top of the template (almost like a form or "key" for the user to fill out before their page is generated). Or do you find just placing the variables only where they will actually be used in the content to be most successful?

[Robert DaSilva]

@Andrew Zimmerman Great question! I think it depends on the length of your template.

• For short documents where all content is displayed when you're looking at the preview, having the variables dispersed is probably fine.
• For longer documents, users will need to scroll down to find the other variable placements, so having them listed at the top can be very useful.

⚠️ The biggest factor to consider here is that templates with variables can be created even if you have not populated all of the variables. So there could be a situation where a well hidden variable becomes blank because your user forgot to put something there.

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I personally like to have a section at the top of the document where each variable resides, with a nice big info panel to inform the user to ensure everything is populated before they hit create. I am biased though, as most of the documents I am using variables with are quite long, and usually contractual in nature, so the wording can be quite dense too.

[Andrew Zimmerman]

That makes sense! Right on; thanks for sharing.