Confluence Cloud - excerpts

Question

I have a largish Glossary table that I wish to share on many pages. I've created an excerpt in the main page that contains the Glossary table. I want it in wide format.

When publishing the page, the table is squished and wordwrapped so it only appears on the left side of the page.

I've tried expanding the table but it won't go beyond the limitations of the excerpt box. It shows as wide when editing but half width when published.

This happens on both the main page containing the excerpt and the page that links to the excerpt.

Is there any way to fix this?

James Gamble · Accepted Answer

Hola Jason,

This comes down to how Confluence handles Excerpt macros and how Jira Service Management renders them in the Help Center.

Even if your table looks fine in edit mode, once the page is published, especially when it’s pulled into an excerpt or excerpt-include, Confluence wraps it in a constrained container. That container doesn’t behave like a full page layout, so wide content like tables will naturally shrink, wrap, and end up looking compressed or left-aligned.

It’s not really something you’ve done wrong; it’s just how the excerpt system is designed. Excerpts are meant for reusing content, not controlling layout, so they inherit whatever width constraints the surrounding page or viewer applies.

Atlassian’s docs on the macro reflect this behavior here: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-the-excerpt-macro/
and the include behavior works the same way since it’s just rendering that excerpt inside another page.

In Jira Service Management specifically, it gets even tighter because the Help Center adds its own layout constraints on top of Confluence, so anything coming through that KB layer will rarely render at full width.

There isn’t really a setting to force excerpts to respect full page width. The usual workaround is to avoid putting wide tables inside excerpts in the first place or to move that kind of content to a dedicated page and just link or embed it instead.

Thanks,

James

Ren Takahashi · Accepted Answer

Hi @Jason Cross, I would first separate two things: whether the excerpt is being reused correctly, and whether the destination page layout is giving the table enough width.

For the reuse part, the source page should have the table inside an Excerpt macro, preferably with a unique excerpt name. On the destination pages, use the Insert excerpt macro and select that named excerpt. In the Insert excerpt settings, I would preview it and try removing the title/frame if the frame is making the table feel narrower.

If the table is still cramped, check the destination page layout as well. A wide table inserted into a narrow section will still be constrained by that section. I would test it on a blank page using a full-width section first, just to confirm whether the problem is the macro or the page layout.

If the whole glossary page is meant to be reused, the Include content/page macro or a synced block may also be worth comparing with excerpts.