nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

How can I navigate a Confluence page by headings?

davis.smith

I'm an IT technical writing contractor who first used Confluence between August 2021 and April 2022. At that time, there was a pane (on the left, I think) that allowed me to go directly to any given heading on the page I was working on. That contract ended and when I finally got another contract, they had me working in Word. After that 12-month contract ended, it was 18 months before I could get another job in tech.

My current employer, happily, has me working with Confluence again, but I can't find the "headings pane" and have to scroll through the entire document (page, in Confluence terms) to locate a given section. Is the "headings pane" gone, or did it just move to a submenu? Thanks.

Accepted answers

Varsha Joshi

Hi @davis_smith

I have been using the table of contents that kind of serves the same thing that you are looking for.

Hope this helps.

All comments

Kris Klima _K15t_

Hi @davis_smith and welcome to the Community.

Unless I misunderstood, you're looking for the left side page tree.

If it's gone completely, then you can toggle this little icon.

Pages are normally nested under Content. If you click it, you should be able to see all the pages.

davis.smith

Hi, Kris, and thank you.

I have the tree view of pages I am and am not working on, which would be great for navigating between documents that I may or may not be working on. But that doesn't really fit with my process and isn't quite what I'm trying to achieve. I'm trying to navigate within the document that I am working on. I do (or used to) use that frequently. Lacking that helpful feature, when I'm editing documents (probably over 75% of my Confluence time) I spend a LOT of time scrolling, looking for headings.

As I said, what I'm looking for may not exist anymore (2.5 years in software development terms is analogous to a geologic epoch); the feature I'm looking for, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed Confluence so much, may have been phased out two years ago in one of Atlassian's thrice-weekly upgrades.

Any further insight would be appreciated. Thanks for letting me vent.

Varsha Joshi

Hi @davis_smith

I have been using the table of contents that kind of serves the same thing that you are looking for.

Hope this helps.

matthew barrett

I believe marketplace apps are the only way to have a pinned/stationary table of contents that doesn't scroll with the rest of the page. I have also been looking for this solution for quite a while.

I discovered you can use comments as a bit of a hack. If you grab your header links and drop them into a comment as URL or Inline, you can pin the comment window on the right side and use it as a nav bar.

davis.smith

@matthew barrett, that’s ingenious! It’s not even that much more work than the persistent sidebar.

davis.smith

Thanks, @Varsha Joshi!

That’s a great idea! It’s a little bit more work than the persistent Headings sidebar Confluence’s creative team, in their infinite wisdom, chose to discontinue sometime in the last 2.5 years when they realized they could monetize a useful feature. (Heaven knows they aren’t making enough money.) But your hack certainly accomplishes what I’m trying to accomplish with minimal extra effort.

Don't get me wrong, I love Confluence. Period. Full stop. But, Atlassian's apparent policy of “change for the sake of change – especially when we can squeeze another dime out of ‘em” eats away at the good will they earn with their products and diminishes those products. And I wish they’d learn that a bunch of engineers who know infinitely more than I ever knew about creating great software do NOT know more than I’ve learned through trial and (mostly) error over the last 28¾ years in technical communication about how to simplify my process in creating effective documentation.

Thanks for letting me vent. Again.

Varsha Joshi

Agree with you 100%. We kind of get used to the UI and kind of master our workflow but then things get changed and I keep fighting muscle memory and UI change :-)

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