My favorite Confluence tips

[#1]

Every once in a while I will mention something about Confluence to a colleague and get a reply "Oh! I didn't know about that. That's actually pretty cool". So back in February I made a list of my favorite ways to use Confluence... and it's been gathering dust since then :-/

A big shout out to @Andy Gladstone for motivating me to finish!

In no particular order, here are some of my favorite Confluence tips:

Using / as a short for macros

Instead of opening the "insert elements" option in the page toolbar, use a forward slash / and then start typing to quickly find a macro. I use it all the time when I want to add a link to another page: just type "link" for the link macro to appear.

Double // to add a date

// brings up the date macro. I use this all the time when adding due dates to tables listing project stages, or to meeting notes.

Find pages quickly with the Recent

You know that tab on the top menu right next to Spaces, the one that says Recent? It is so helpful to find pages you worked on recently. It automatically groups pages by Today, Yesterday, In the last week. You can quickly filter by title too. I often use this instead of Search because it's already narrowed down the results to pages I worked on, created, starred, or forgot to publish (I mean, Drafts).

Confluence calendars

I work in Marketing, so I'm a big fan of Confluence calendars to schedule and share information about things like monthly email newsletters, when an event is happening, what campaign is running on social media, etc.

But since I don't manage my daily or weekly schedule in a Confluence calendar, I like subscribing so I can see the events in my regular agenda. So many times I have been looking at the upcoming 1-3 weeks to see what meetings or events are coming soon, and I see an event like "Monthly newsletter" from a Confluence calendar and it reminds me to block time to work on the task.

Page watchers

Now this should be used sparingly and only in certain situations, but for key pages where I want to make sure a colleague is aware of any changes (like a meeting agenda page), I like to add people as watchers through the manage watchers option.

People can of course unwatch the page, but if they didn't realize the page was there or don't visit it often, watching it is an easy way to be notified of changes.

Add an emoji to a page title

What's the statistic? our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text? When I'm creating lots of pages with child pages, I try to add distinctive and different colored emojis to the page titles because I find it makes it sooo much easier to find the page I need later when I'm going through the page tree.

I know when I'm looking for a page I have more the color of the emoji in mind than the specific page title.

Page status

Another one of those under used features: adding a status to the page to let people know if it's a draft, ready for review, or finished. It's a much more elegant solution than titling your page WIP or DRAFT. And since "Page status changed" is one of the triggers available in Automation for Confluence, it's also a better option if you want to set up some automations.

Table of contents macro

Your page is super long? Mine too. Make it easier for colleagues to navigate the page by adding a table of contents macro to the top of the page. I like putting emojis in my paragraph headers too, and then they make the table of contents look nice.

And that green zone above the table of contents macro is a panel.

Expand macro

Background or extra, non-essential, information can be put in an expand macro so people stay focused on the key things on your page. Just hit / and start typing expand. Give the expand a title so people have an idea of what kind of content is collapsed in the macro.

Include page

I love using the Include page macro to avoid having to update the same information in two places. Recently I used it to make some marketing resources easily available from a space used by non-marketing colleagues. The source material is worked on in multiple spaces, and lives as child or child-child pages, so not easy for non-marketing colleagues to find.

But instead of asking marketing colleagues to update information in two places (their team space AND the non-marketing space), I just updated the non-marketing space pages with the Include page macro. Any change made in the source page is automatically displayed on the other page where non-marketing colleagues go.

Decisions macro

I'm probably working on too many projects at the same time. Which means I can forget what was decided when I chatted with a colleague about project ABC 3 days ago. So now I (over?) use the decision macro to note on the Confluence page what we decided during our meeting.

Smartlinks

This is my latest favorite feature: adding links within your page tree to things outside of Confluence. For example, I have added a link to a Google presentation right alongside other Confluence content because I know people looking for information contained on the Confluence pages will also be interested in the presentation.

[Laurie Sciutti]

Great tips, @Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_ !  Thank you!

[Andy Gladstone]

@Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_ thanks for publishing. Your point about images (emojis) in page name is a great one. I looked in my instance and see that I have used 3 specific images too frequently, which must be counter-productive for creating a memorable link for users - so I have started updating them.

I love the ToC macro as well and use it often. I'm just waiting for the day that it becomes a floating macro in Cloud to feel fully content.

[Amanda Barber]

I'll second the comment from @Andy Gladstone - I use the same emoji for all of my release notes, but I'm thinking maybe I could try to find a relevant emoji for each release note to be more memorable/findable.