5 Tips to Effectively Track Progress in Confluence with The Progress Bar Macro

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Every Confluence page you create or access is part of a process—a process of creating the page, completing tasks within it, and so on. I don’t know about you, but whenever I access a page, I expect those steps to be front and center. They give me context, direction, and a clear sense of what I have achieved and what to expect.

Confluence pages often lack a clear way to visualize progress, be it because the creators don’t feel they are important or they don’t have the tools for it. This  leaves your users struggling to track their progress and visualize the entire process. While textual updates (if you are old fashioned) or page statutes (if you like native Confluence features) are useful, they don't offer the immediate clarity that a visual representation can provide. You know where this is going 😀: 

Enter the Progress Bar—a simple yet intuitive macro to help you set your processes and effectively track them.

Why use progress bars in Confluence?

• Visualize progress easily: Let’s start with the obvious, Progress bars offer a snapshot of progress, helping your teams quickly assess the status of the Confluence page they are navigating, track and manage workflows.

• Boost team productivity and engagement: Ever noticed how seeing a progress bar inch closer to 100% or the final step gives you that little boost of motivation? That's no accident. Progress bars tap into our natural desire to complete tasks and achieve goals. They provide a clear, visual reminder of how far we've come and how close we are to finishing. This can be incredibly motivating, helping to keep teams focused, driven and productive.

• Simplify complex projects: Processes can grow to become complex and intimidating if they are not properly simplified. Progress bars help you break down complex project and workflows into manageable steps.

Popular use cases for progress bars

• Onboarding: When it comes to onboarding, there are different tasks to complete within specific timeframes—first day, first week, and so on. And, of course, newcomers will complete these tasks within their dedicated personal spaces (and in a perfect world, at their own pace). Progress bars can help new hires see at a glance how far along they are within the process, making it easier to stay on track without feeling overwhelmed.

• Training: If you're participating in a training program, progress bars can show you exactly where you are in the curriculum. This visual aid keeps you motivated and helps you manage your time effectively.

• Project Management: Regardless of the project nature or complexity, progress bars are essential (or nice to haves for some). They help all parties involved visualize and edit the progress of projects, track milestones, deadlines, and overall completion status.

How to effectively use progress bars in Confluence

• Properly describe your progress steps: Use clear and concise labels for each stage of your progress bar to ensure users understand what each segment represents. For example, use labels like "Research," "Development," and "Review" to show different phases of a project.

• Leverage colors and styles: Customize your progress bars with colors and styles that fit your page's design and make the progress easy to understand at a glance. For instance, use green for completed tasks, yellow for tasks in progress, and red for pending tasks.

• Embed in key locations: Place progress bars in prominent locations on your pages to provide immediate visibility of task or project status. For example, put a progress bar at the top of a project page to give an instant overview. Another key placement, especially for percentage progress bars, are tables or any other macros to be used within dashboards. The progress bar can be placed within specific table cells indicating the progress of each project. 

• Use progress bars for milestones, Not page status: Progress bars are ideal for showing the advancement of specific tasks or milestones rather than the overall status of a page. For example, use a progress bar to indicate the completion percentage of a multi-step project rather than just marking a page as "In Progress."

• When to use steps vs. percentage progress: Choosing which progress type to include within your Confluence page is crucial as it depends on a variety of factors including the project type, stages, and more. Use step-based progress bars when you want to highlight the specific stages of a process such as content creation for example. Percentage-based progress bars, on the other hand, are ideal for tracking the overall completion of projects. They are generally used to show how much work has been done and how much remains.

How to implement the newly revamped progress bar?

Three simple words: Place, Customize and Specify

• Place the progress bar macro:

As a general rule of thumb, you would place your progress bars at the top of your page. But as mentioned earlier, you can place them within specific table cells, or any other macros (it is up to you). Regardless:

1. Navigate to your Confluence and hit edit

2. Choose where to place the progress bar, and hit /progress bar, and select Progress Bar | Vectors

• Customize your progress bar

A dialog box will appear, where you can start customizing your progress bar. Here you can choose the type (be it steps or percentage). Depending on the type, you can then select the progression style, and of course, appearance and colors.

 

• Specify the steps or percentage

Last but not least, specify your progress bar content. If you have chosen steps as your progress type, specify the number of steps, choose a title for each step, include links (if you like), and specify the current step. When it comes to percentage, indicate a title and include the percentage. 

•  And Voila! Hit Save & Update

And there you have it! Progress bars are a vital tool to break down processes, enhance visibility and track progress. If you find progress bars useful, consider trying out our newly revamped Progress Bar macro, part of the Content Formatting Toolkit for Confluence Cloud by Vectors.