Confluence Cloud - Limitations?

[Shawn in Van]

Hello all,

I am currently involved in my first significant content creation in Confluence Cloud and I keep running into very perplexing limitations with this product. Is it me or are these true limitations?

• Connect create a link that will open in a new tab.
  I am creating a training lesson where I link the student to other Confluent content. However, I don't want the learner to leave the master Confluence page.
  I want to embed a link like this:
  <a href='https: // company. atlassian. net/ wiki/ x/ tinylink' target="_blank">
  Page Title</a> (edited to hopefully STOP being labeled as SPAM! grrrr)
• Cannot create custom macros (I recall being able to do this in the self-hosted version).
  I want to create a custom "info bar" with a clock icon.
  Also, a custom macro could potentially fix the link issue.
• Is it possible to save an edited page without publishing. Until I become more experienced and confident with Confluence, I might edit and publish a page many times, I don't want xx number of edit reports being sent. I turned off "Notify watchers", is that enough?
• How do I control the size of an embedded Draw.io drawing? It seems to only have a 1:1 size availability.
• Confluence tables seem very limited.
  - Bold attribute has no effect. Text is always bold. Other attributes work.
  - No option to vertically center text. If I insert an image alongside text, the image is not vertically aligned with the text. :(
  - No border options (change color, width, etc.)
  - Color fill options are limited to five colors plus transparent.
• Stored images... the only time I can see them is when I select Insert Files and Images (attached to this page). I must close the EDIT mode and select Attachments to see the all the attachments but I still cannot delete any of them. Because I've done a lot of experimenting on a page, I have a lot of attachments associated with the page that are no longer needed. 
  How do I delete old, obsolete attachments?
  I looked at this page:
  https :// experts.missouristate. edu /display /KB/ How+to+View+and+Remove+Unused+Page+Attachments+From+Your+Team+Space (edited to hopefully STOP being labeled as SPAM! grrrr)
  But I do not have a delete option... just: View, Properties, and Edit File.

That's all for now.

Thank you for any advice. :)

[David Benson]

Resizing the viewer has to be done in the draw.io editor, due to technical limitations in cloud. See https://desk.draw.io/solution/articles/16000061101-how-to-resize-the-draw-io-viewer-in-confluence-cloud

[Davin Studer]

Many of your pain points are mainly due to being on the cloud version. It is locked down quite a bit. One of the main reasons is that you are on shared hosting and they don't want your site to be able to adversely affect other people's sites by installing poorly coded add-ons, etc.

Here are answers to your questions above. I've numbered them in order of your bullets.

1. Unfortunately, I know of no way to do this in the cloud version.
2. User macros are not possible in the cloud version.
3. Yep. Simply click close. When you come back your unpublished changes will come back up. Changes are saved as you type.
4. Click the draw.io macro and you should see an option for "edit macro". That will allow you to set the size. Disclaimer this is how you do it on the server version ... it may be different in the cloud version.
5. break down below
   
   1. Only heading rows are always bold. If you want something to look like a heading row, but not be bold change it to a normal row and give it a background color.
   2. You are correct that you cannot do a valign. This can be achieved in the server version, but not cloud.
   3. Correct as well. No options for borders. This can be achieved in the server version, but not cloud.
   4. Correct again
6. You may not have the space permission for deleting attachments. This is a specific permission granted by your Confluence administrator.

[Shawn in Van]

Thanks for your kind reply Davin. 

I imagine that much of my frustration will fade once I understand and accept these frustrating limitations. It's important that I create good looking and functional documentation so I'll just have to find ways to compensate.

>4. Click the draw.io macro and you should see an option for "edit macro". 

Unfortunately, no "edit macro" option is available.

I do understand the need to lock down some of the functionality but many of all the limits that I am observing are simply perplexing and really shouldn't have anything to do with the security or function of the shared application. 

Sigh... I'm going to learn to accept my reality for now. LOL

Thanks again.

[Davin Studer]

4. Hmmm ... bummer. I would check with Draw.io support on that then. They may not have a way to do it and that could be why you don't have the option. Cloud add-ons are different than server version add-ons and more limited in what they can do.