New tables in Confluence Cloud are really, really awful.

[dave_drexler]

I just want to vent a bit. I recently migrated from an older version of Confluence to a cloud instance, and I find the new table functionality appalling. It's broken - so much capability is just gone. No ability to control the width, adding and removing rows and columns is really wonky, formatting capability lost.

Tabbing through the table in edit mode is buggy and weird, trying to select a table, or just a row or cell is nearly impossible.

I used to enter a one-row, one-column table to put a TOC in a nice grey box - really fast and easy to do. Not anymore!

Also - while I'm venting: whose idea was it to change the link shortcut in the editor? Where I used to type '[' and choose the most recent page(s), now I have to type '/link', and hit enter. From one keystroke to six! W...T...H...?

Whoever is in charge of UX at Atlassian needs a severe finger-shaking.

[Carolynn Kemmerer]

I totally agree.  Not being able to control the width is awful!  Also you can no longer embed a table within a table!  Why take AWAY functionality????  

[Gina Palombit]

I've been having these same issues. I've been frustrated that there are color limitations with the tables. Why not have the option to input our own hex codes for the color? I honestly hate the new editor because of all the bugs with formatting. It's near impossible to make pages look nice visually with all the limitations. 

[Katerina Kovriga _Stiltsoft_]

We've recenly came across different questions related to Confluence Cloud and its tables, so we decided to create a short video tutorial and upload it to our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/EV8uNE7utXk

Hope it will help new Confluence Cloud users.

[Carolynn Kemmerer]

It still doesn't show how to size the tables so they don't go totally across the page when you only have 2 columns.

[Borja Martín]

The problem isn't about knowing how it works.

The problem is: "how it works", actually. As the title said: "new tables are awful" (vertical alignment, color display, width, combined-cells, HTML-custom, etc..)

Not even a "slim table" option... 

[Jonathan McGuire]

The UI/UX needs to be discoverable and not require videos and training. In every other App I've been able to create and modify tables I've never had the issues I have in Confluence now.

[Anneke Grant]

Not being able to set the width is a real problem...

Especially if you only have one or two columns with not much data (width) in them! Looks really ugly.

Think I'm going to have to use the old editing experience to get around it...

[Carolynn Kemmerer]

Totally agree!!!  I have been using the old editor for this and the fact that you can't have tables within tables.  WHY take OUT functionality????  

[Stan Sultanov]

Agree. New tables are impossible to use. It almost seems like someone is trying to (why??) discourage people from using tables.

[Steve Phillips]

Agree entirely.  Having been a user of the non-cloud version of Confluence for years, I had intended to use it as the basis for documenting a new project I am working on.  Having created a new account on Confluence Cloud however, the table functionality is embarrassingly bad, clumsy, inflexible, and a huge downgrade from the historical Confluence functionality.  Quite remarkable that this made it past any UAT phase.  Since virtually every page I would create would have multiple tables on it, the spectacularly bad implementation of tables on Confluence Cloud rules it out as a contender for my project.  Disappointed. 

[Bruce Zhang]

It is more than awful

[Josh Gray]

Totally agree. Does anyone know what the roadmap on this looks like? Given the first post was April of 2020 and it’s now Jan 2021, and basic functionality like table sizing is still absent, it would be helpful to know if it’s being considered. 

[Brian Son]

seriously, you need to fire the guy who made the new table. just give us back the old one. 

[markbearden]

When will Confluence cloud add support for tables, which all other document platforms in the entire universe support?  (Oh, you say they "do support tables"?  See my final paragraph here.)

It seems to do no good to tell Atlassian how HORRIBLE their UI is; I have never seen any signs of improvement or even feedback.   But it feels good to do something, so here I am venting as well.

Wondering how we got here.  I think that Atlassian once had some smart developers and designer; got a big market share as a result; and then those smart people obviously left and were replace by really, really, really bad designers who not only committed crimes against product management by destroying an older more functional product, but can't seem to "hear" hundreds or thousands of customers screaming "Please put back what worked".

See, this is mere venting of huge ongoing frustration...

Summary: Atlassian/Confluence ELIMINATED tables in their Cloud product.  What they have now is not usable, period.  So, they should add support for tables!

[Emmanuel Zabey]

Awful indeed. Makes me wonder if we should keep on using Confluence for documentation. Embedding of images is a catastrophe too. Anyone knows of a workaround or add-on to fix this ?

[Gina Palombit]

Hey Emmanuel, the only work-around I've found is to either use the Legacy Editor as a template, or use tables to control the size of images. Using tables to control the image sizes is REALLY annoying, but it has worked for me, just not the prettiest thing. 

[Jordan Watt]

I cannot agree any harder with the complaints about working with tables.

Confluence should have their employees sit with the teams and people who use them.

Forcing everyone into these ill-conceived patterns is an annoying trend across the industry.  What's next, Confluence is going to make every panel borderless??

[dylanwoo]

I couldn't agree more... they stink!

[Angelo Edades]

It's October 2022 and there are limited options to work with tables.

There's too much padding, no control, - its a step back from confluence server.

???

[Bryon Fevens]

How in Zarquons name did something like this ever get past a design review????  This reeks of a Prod mgr needing to justify their existence...."Hmmm...i need to change something to show I'm needed..."  and then it cant be backed out as the utterly brain dead change it is, lest said Product Mgr look like a goof... why is atlassian losing market share to others... here is one reason why. 

I've been a long time user and fan of Atlassian products, well over 10 years now, maybe closer to 15 and have always recommended Jira and Confluence as a starting point...i no longer recommended confluence; it seems to want to be a blogging tool only (which is about the only thing I've never used it for these past years)..and jira is starting to look like less than stellar recommendation these days vs the competition....market intertia only gets you so far Atlassian

[Leonard Vorobej]

Totally agree. This is outrageous what has happened. The simple feature has become total horseshit. Just spent 15min.+ searching and correcting tables which has broken after using expansion button. And can't change last row width. WTF (what the functionality) is this! This is such a wow!

[Jonathan McGuire]

We just migrated our team from a standalone Atlassian instance to cloud and all I can say is the table UI in cloud is horrible.

After spending 15 minutes trying to use Confluence to be the place I'll publish some JIRA table reports I give up and I'll stick with formatting the data in Keynote slides and publishing PDF exports.

[Wolfram Ehnert]

I newly migrated from server to cloud and completely agree to the above mentioned critics.

What makes me most sad is that plenty of comments have been made more than 2 years ago and apparently nothing has changed.

No good perspectives ... :-(

[Gregory Muir]

Man, I'm going through user acceptance trials after a BEAST of a time getting the broken migration tool to work and these tables are miserable. That they haven't changed a bit since this topic was first opened is absolutely criminal. Absolutely garbage interface and a total downgrade from Server.

[Sergii Kozak]

Tables in Confluence is just highly unusable rubbish. Well, not only just tables, I have to admit that for years of experience of using Confluence I got mainly that type of feeling: "what a rubbish". And by the way, same feedback for Jira. Apparently Atlassian got tons of customers/users who are totally fine to pay for that kind of quality products.