How do I edit a Confluence whiteboard flowchart?

[davis_smith]

I started a flowchart on the Confluence whiteboard yesterday. Surprise, surprise, I want to update the flowchart today. How do I do that? (If I'd been working with a Visio flowchart, I'd have finished the update an hour ago...)

When I left-click the flowchart, nothing happens. No cursor, no pop-up editing toolbar, nothing. I right-click and get the standard, right-click pop-up menu with nothing flowchart- or whiteboard-specific. (A real context menu would have something relating to the flowchart or the whiteboard. That's why it's called a context menu). I asked Google's AI and its responses didn't describe what I get.

I guess I'll just start a new one while I wait for an answer. THIS is where Message Boards, Shared User Experience, and Communities fail. If software development companies would pony-up and hire qualified, experienced technical writers to create real, useful documentation instead of being greedy and lining their own pockets, I'd have my answer in the time it took to describe my problem because I could have looked it up MYSELF.

[Germán Morales _ Hiera]

Hi @davis_smith, that combination, left-click doing nothing and right-click giving you the browser's own menu, is the tell: you're not actually inside the live whiteboard. In a working whiteboard a left-click selects a shape and brings up the floating toolbar, and a right-click gives whiteboard options like "copy link to object", not your browser's context menu. So either you're looking at the whiteboard embedded as a preview on a page rather than the whiteboard itself, or it opened but didn't finish loading.

Open the whiteboard as its own item from the space's content tree (or click the embed and choose to open it), and the canvas becomes live. From there, a single click on a shape selects it and brings up the toolbar for shape, colour and border, a double-click lets you edit its text, and you drag a connector's end point to re-route it; the Shape and Line tools add more, and Delete removes whatever's selected. If you're certain you're already in the opened whiteboard and it's still dead, treat it as a loading problem and hard-refresh or try another browser with extensions off, since the canvas is heavy and a partial load leaves it exactly this unresponsive with the native right-click. Steps for the shape editing are here: Use shapes to visualize ideas

[davis_smith]

Thanks, @Germán Morales _ Hiera! 

[davis_smith]

With your help, I've been able to edit the flow chart. Now I'm having difficulty getting it to display on the Confluence page at an appropriate size. Adjusting the size of the flow chart in the Whiteboard application doesn't have a visible effect on the Confluence image. There's a sizing widget that appears in Confluence with the flow chart, though I can't seem to activate it,

Any clues on how to resize a Whiteboard flow chart in Confluence?

[Germán Morales _ Hiera]

The reason that widget won't do anything is that it only lives in the page editor. Resizing inside the Whiteboard app changes the board, not the embed, so nothing moves on the page. Open the Confluence page in Edit mode, click the embedded whiteboard once to select it, and the floating toolbar that appears is the sizing control. In view mode it's inert, which is exactly why it looked like you couldn't activate it.

With the embed selected, check that its display is set to Embed rather than Card or Inline, then use the toolbar's width and alignment options to set how large it shows, and publish so the size sticks. If you want a particular part of the board framed, arrange that in the whiteboard first, but the on-page dimensions are always driven by that editor toolbar, never by zooming inside the whiteboard. Embedding and the display options are covered here: inserting links to your whiteboard.

[davis_smith]

I appreciate your help, @Germán Morales _ Hiera.  To get the toolbar, I had to open the flow chart in the Whiteboard app; I couldn't get the toolbar from simply clicking the flow chart in Confluence's Edit mode, which may have been what you were telling me,

Display mode is correct (Embed). Alignment mode is correct. I don't see anything labeled width or anything close, but I may (probably) just don't recognize the enlightened terminology. All I'm trying to do is embed a flow chart in my User Guide. This seems like a hell of a lot of effort that used to be copy from Visio and paste into Word (or FrameMaker). I realize Confluence is a different animal than Word or even FrameMaker, but tell me again why it's better? (Not really, just tell me how to change the width setting and we'll go from there...) Thanks.

[davis_smith]

I can see the flow chart in Confluence. It's a little larger than I would prefer, but I'm choosing my battles. Last Friday, I exported the Confluence page to PDF and the whiteboard flow chart didn't show up at all in the PDF file. This morning I tried it again hoping I simply hadn't given it enough time. The flow chart still isn't in the PDF.

Somewhere, I'm not doing something right. Any guidance? Is there a better way to create a flow chart in Confluence? Thanks!

[davis_smith]

Solved. I asked Google (not ChatGPT or Claude) "Why is my Confluence whiteboard diagram not showing in PDF of the Confluence page?" Google told me that PDF has trouble with Whiteboard images and I should export the image to a high-resolution PDF and treat it like any other image, I shared the PDF'd flow chart with Paint (surprisingly, Paint was an option), saved it as a PNG, and uploaded it to my Confluence page as if it were just another image. When I PDF'd the Confluence page. Acrobat treated my flow chart like a PNG image (because that's what it was.) And I was able to size it appropriately.