How to collect user feedback for apps in Confluence: an update from the Stiltsoft team

[Stiltsoft support]

Hi guys!

Here is the Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence team with the updates regarding our discussion from last week.

Unfortunately, we weren't successful in engaging people in the discussion but some of our customers came to the support, mentioned that post and asked questions which they hesitated to ask before (or simply didn't know how to refer to our support). 

So, for all the users who have any 3rd party apps installed: please don't be afraid to create support requests! If the thing that you are asking for already exists, we'll be happy to point you in the right direction. If there is no such feature but it can be implemented in the future, your ticket will be linked to our internal roadmap and you'll be notified after the release.

Here is the link to our support portal.

And let us say a big thank you to all the customers who shared their thoughts with us! Every use case counts, as we often say.

[Stiltsoft support]

Among several feature requests that we got via the support portal, we also received another bunch of use cases that could be done with the help of our app but somehow were missed by our customers. As we've decided to write a kind of a close-up for the discussion, let me take a chance to describe them - maybe other Community users will come across this thread and get some useful hints.

Again some users who migrated from Server to Cloud were confused that they didn't see any filters in the headers of there tables. "Please provide an opportunity to insert filters (charts, pivots) from the page view mode!"

The issue lays in the internal organization of the new Cloud editor - remember the Table Toolbox and macro nesting from the previous discussion?

So, for this case we have another workaround: please find the Quick Insert Button at the top right of every page. This button allows you to add macros to existing tables in the View mode.

Other questions also concerned the Table Filter macro:

• Why should we always fill empty cells with some dummy data (for example, "Null") to filter them out? - You shouldn't. The Dropdown filter recognizes empty cells, there will be the "Empty" option in the menu.
  
• Why are both the from and to dates mandatory while setting a date range type of filter? - These dates are not mandatory, you may use both of them or only the first/second one.
  
• How to set the reversed (inversed, not equal) filters? - Please check this part of our documentation. You just need to click the = icon for the appropriate filter on the filtration panel. The icon changes to ≠ which means that the filter operates in the reversed mode.

[Stiltsoft support]

The next questions concern the Chart from Table macro.

Our users weren't sure how to make the configuration panel visible in the View mode to change the graph's settings on the fly. 

The solution is very simple: just go to the "Look" tab of the Chart from Table macro settings and uncheck the "Hide chart controls" option.

And to make sure how your chart will look when published, you have the Refresh Preview Button.

[Stiltsoft support]

The Pivot Table macro was mentioned only by one user who missed the option to hide totals. We do have this described in our documentation, please check this abstract.

The Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include macros are thoroughly described here.

You should understand that 

• The excerpts are found by their names
• You can collect excerpts from the current page, from pages with specific labels, from child pages, from child pages and all the descendants (the whole page tree)
• You can collect multiple-row tables and show them as a combined report
• You can show various types of the source page metadata if required

We can say that as for now the Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include macros are an advanced version of the standard Page Properties/Page Properties Report macros. Furthermore, you'll be able to wrap the Table Excerpt Include macro in other macros for additional filtration, aggregation, and visualization.

[Stiltsoft support]

And the last two questions are more general but nevertheless.

We were asked when we were going to introduce AI in our app. Not sure if it was a real question or a kind of a joke, but we do have AI assistants inside the Table Transformer and Table Spreadsheet macros.

And we also have the AI Table macro that was developed specifically for this purpose.

And it is not a revelation: for example, here, in the Atlassian Community, on the 14th of March, 2024 we posted a big article related to the AI features in the Table Filter, Chart & Spreadsheets for Confluence app. 

And we were also prompted to introduce dropdown lists in our app. Here you may have two options as for now:

• Use the Table Spreadsheet macro and create dropdown lists like you do it in Excel
• Check the Handy Macros for Confluence - Formatting and Interactive UI app that is also developed by our company. Besides other useful macros, it provides dropdown menus for native Confluence tables

Seems that's all about it and we can wrap this topic up. All your comments and suggestions are still more than welcome!

And again many-many thanks to all the users who referred to our support after the first part of the discussion!