🔦 Feature spotlight: Elements in Confluence

[#1]

👋🏼 Hey all! Ellie again from the Confluence Product Marketing team.

Starting off the new year, this month’s feature spotlight is an oldie but a goodie: Elements in Confluence

When you think of a great Confluence page (or really any piece of good content), it’s rarely just a wall of text. The best pages typically have clean and skimmable formatting and a sprinkle of visual elements to help readers stay engaged and digest information in a clear and concise way. Enter: elements.

Think of Elements in Confluence as building blocks for your page that bring the extra layer of pizazz to your content to improve readability, communicate and highlight important details, and add additional context where relevant to help you deliver your highest quality work.

There are lots of elements available in Confluence, so today, we’ll cover just a few of our most popular and frequently used ones. Let us know in the comments if there are specific elements you want us to cover in more detail in another post!

Status

The Status element is just…*chefs kiss*. It allows you to add a customizable and colorful pill to your content to depict the status, such as In Progress, Blocked, Done, or even specific tags like departments or teams.

For a shortcut, type /status to quickly add this element from the slash command.

Dates

Perhaps the most underrated but most used element is Dates. It’s exactly as you’d expect — just a simple element to show a specific date. However, it’s especially useful when used in tables as you can sort your table content chronologically instead of alphabetically.

For a shortcut, type /date to quickly add this element from the slash command.

Expand

The Expand element is especially useful for dense content where there is a lot of information that may be overwhelming to the readers. This element cleverly allows you to create collapsed sections that reveals more information for the people who seek it.

For a shortcut, type /expand to quickly add this element from the slash command.

Panel

If I had to pick one element as my favorite to use, it would be the Panel. This nifty element allows you to highlight important information with an emoji and colored text box that draws the readers eye.

There are five preset panel options: info, note, error, success, and warning, in addition to a custom panel where you can choose one of the 20 background colors available and select a fitting emoji to represent the type of content you’re highlighting.

For a shortcut, type /panel to quickly add this element from the slash command.

Code Snippet

The Code Snippet is a particularly useful element for those in technical roles. Perfect for creating useful documentation, this element allows you to format source code with numbered rows and syntax highlighting based on the language you choose.

For a shortcut…

1. Type /code to quickly add this element from the slash command

2. Type three back ticks, i.e ``` with the keyboard to create a code block. You can also type ``` before a line of text to add this to the code block.

3. Type text between two back ticks, i.e `some text` to create inline code.

Which elements are your favorite to use? Let us know in the comments below 👇🏼 We love hearing from our users and how they are using Confluence.

'Till next time ✌🏼❤️,
Ellie

[Andy Gladstone]

@Ellie Kulick this may be the earliest time I have seen the use of 'elements' to refer to what we commonly call 'macros'. I have seen this usage a bit more recently, but no official communication from Atlassian about a change in terminology. Anything you can share on this?