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 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.

Accepted answers

All comments

Germán Morales

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!

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

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.

AppGenesis

Hi @davis_smith,

If left-click does nothing and right-click gives you the browser's own context menu, you're most likely looking at the embedded preview on the page — not the live whiteboard canvas. You need to open the whiteboard as its own item (click the embed → "Open whiteboard") for the editing tools to appear.

That said, if you're looking for a simpler way to create and edit flowcharts on Confluence pages, there's another option: type /Sketch2Diagram on any Confluence page, sketch your flowchart on paper or in any drawing tool, upload a photo, and the AI converts it into a clean, editable diagram embedded directly on the page. From there you can click any node to edit text, drag to reposition, or add/remove connections — all inline on the Confluence page without navigating into a separate whiteboard canvas.

Full disclosure: I'm the developer at AppGenesis who built Sketch2Diagram. Happy to help if you have questions.

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Quick Links

Find more posts tagged with

confluence

cloud

confluence-cloud