Why is a paid product like confluence so bad (forced by my company to switch from free google docs)?

Question

Either there is not much consideration given to usability of the product or it has now so many bells and whistles that simple things are not simple any more.

Consider for example...commenting on some piece of text. Confluence has all sorts of restrictions on what I can select and comment on. I am sure your R&D has 100 explanations for why that is the case or why it should be that way. That does not matter. In the end it's just plain annoying to the users and wastes lot of our time as we need to find another piece of text to place our comment on and then explain that our comment is about that other piece of text. Imagine doing that all the time...

Then there are very basic bugs. For example, you select a piece of text and then try changing the format to 'Header 3', it changes the previous line to 'Header 3' no matter how I try!

Bill Bailey · Answer

Your issue may be that there is a soft return (
between the two line of text. If that is the case, then the editor is doing what it is supposed to. Try deleting any break between the two lines so that they are continuous text, then hit return (no Shift+), then try formatting.

James Dellow · Answer

I've experienced little annoyances with the editor from time to time over the many years I've been using Confluence. I can imagine if you were happily using Google Doc for drafting documents with other people, then those issues are probably very frustrating!

But Confluence is an enterprise wiki and was designed to do more / work differently from Google Docs. All the macros, integrations, permissions system, and other customisation options in Confluence mean I tend to look at the whole solution.

There is are also a lot of competing demands for the editor. There are still people that would like to be able to edit the raw code of pages, while others want to use markdown instead. Luckily, there are solutions for this in the marketplace. You can even integrate with Google Drive and Docs.

But to be fair, Google Docs isn't perfect either. It has got better over the years, but I still run into formatting and functionality issues from time to time if you try to be too clever with it. And I can't believe it still doesn't have native paragraph sorting built-in yet 😀

Michael Andolfatto_a62ntx · Answer

Confluence is much more structured than G Docs. More functionality = more skill & experienced needed, especially true for the admins. Sounds like there are probably internal issues in how access is given or users are trained.

Bugs could be a variety of things, I've never experienced the issue you described, it could be a result of the way Confluence was installed, or user error as well.