It is time for Confluence to have tables with formulas

[Ishaan Dev]

SOOO many knowledge-base platforms have tables that do calculations as a free functionality. I do not know why Confluence has not done this yet. 

It's time!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Oddly, I want to go the other way.

I've spent the last 25 years despairing of spreadsheets.  Don't get me wrong, I think spreadsheets are an incredibly powerful and massively useful tool.   I use them for coding, for record keeping, and and and.  There's no doubt they are a great tool.

For one person.

When you have more than one person using the sheet, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to go wrong.

Many years ago (and a couple of times again, as I moved to other places), the very large financial institution I worked for did an analysis of the spreadsheets their trading branch were using regularly.  It was initially aimed at trying to move the usage into the main trading applications, but it quickly lead to a complete ban on shared spreadsheets.

• Spreadsheets built by, and for, individuals, were fine
• Spreadsheets that had 2 people owning them were wrong, about 75% of the time
• Spreadsheets with 3 people editing them were wrong, 95% of the time
• Spreadsheets with 4 or more were just wrong.  We couldn't find one that wasn't.

Confluence is a collaboration tool, so we expect people to work together on pages and spaces (and hence the tables within them).  So you really really don't want to put spreadsheet functionality into it, because it will fail.

Whilst it would be nice  to see formulae in Confluence in some cases, I'm not sure it's the right place to do it, as a collaboration tool.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Although Confluence doesn't off that as a built-in feature, there are a few third party apps to fill the gap:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=cloud&product=confluence&query=spreadsheet

Some of these are very popular (high installation count), which suggest that they probably do a pretty good job.

[Katerina Rudkovskaya [Stiltsoft]]

Hi @Ishaan Dev,

We can also suggest our app that is Table Filter and Charts for Confluence.

You may check its Table Spreadsheet macro and/or Pivot Table and Table Transformer macros if you prefer to use formulas in native Confluence tables.

We’ll be also happy to arrange a live demo for you and your team – please book a suitable time slot here.