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Pasting in markdown fails to create tasks

Ilan Schemoul
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July 24, 2026

When pasting md with tasks (- []/[ ]/[]) it's not converted to atlassian tasks. Other markdown pasting gets converted just fine.

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Isabelle Ruivo dos Santos
Contributor
July 24, 2026

Hi, @Ilan Schemoul

This is a known limitation of the Atlassian editor — when pasting Markdown, most formatting (bold, headers, code blocks, lists) is converted correctly, but task/checkbox syntax (- [ ] and - [x]) is not automatically converted to Atlassian's native task format.

This happens because Atlassian's task items are a proprietary element in their editor (not a standard Markdown construct), so the paste parser doesn't map - [ ] to it.

Workarounds:

  1. Use the / command — type /task or /action item in the editor to insert a task list natively, then fill in the items manually.
  2. Paste as plain text first (Ctrl+Shift+V), then convert the lines to tasks using the task list button in the toolbar.
  3. Use the Confluence editor toolbar — select the pasted lines and click the ✅ task list icon to convert them.

Unfortunately there's no automatic conversion for this specific syntax at the moment. You can submit a feature request on the https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-questions or vote on existing ones if this is important for your workflow.

Hope this helps...

Ilan Schemoul
I'm New Here
I'm New Here
Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
July 26, 2026

I found the related opened issue https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-8586. More than a decade of people begging for the simplest of feature. Unbelievable they just ignore it, when they implement workflows 100 times more complicated in Jira for example. 

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