How can I have fuller Excel functionality in Confluence ?

[Deleted user]

Hi,

I am getting questions asked by my userbase about having a fuller range of Excel functionality in Confluence.

Right now all my users are able to do which is remotely excel related is

- insert a grid/table and fill it with values
- display an Excel document on a Confluence page, in preview mode

What we would like to be able to do is place formulas in the cells of a table and use it like we would an Excel chart e.g. sum totals, apply operators to values in cells etc etc.

Can somebody please advise how to achieve this?

I have found references to various paid for add-ons, which look like they could be quite expensive for our 500 user license. If we have to pay for a solution to this, we can, but we just need to make sure we get the functionality we need.

Any help on getting around this is most appreciated.

Thanks
Jat

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Confluence is a wiki, not a spreadsheet, it doesn't support that function, and although it may eventually draw in some more clever table related things, I very much doubt it will ever do formulae.

You will need the addons that you've found in order to enable this functionality.  That's what addons are for - adding stuff.

[CelesteCS]

Hello,

If you need to have that part of spreadsheets functionality, which regards any calculations, you may consider CelesteCS Math for Confluence. There are versions for both Confluence Server and Confluence Cloud.

Assume you have a table with three columns and three rows on your page – from A1 till C3, where row 1 is the header row. The sum calculation formula for rows 2 and 3 will be simple:

SUM(Table1.A2:C3)

There is a plenty of other functions in the macro, so you may perform any calculations using formulas in EXCEL style.

Thanks!

[Davin Studer]

Give the add-ons a try. You can get a 30 day licence to see if they are right for you. Another option that would be free and would give you much of the same abilities would be a google docs spreadsheet. You could create it in Google docs and embed it in a Confluence page. This may or may not work for you depending upon the type of data in the spreadsheet and if you want it on Google's servers or not, but it is another option.

[Mike Rathwell]

Jat,

As you'll have found, there are a few plugins that do a reasonable job of at least some "spreadsheet" functionality. That said, we have been on an active mission in our engineering group to stomp out spreadsheets. More often than not, we ended up with static information that was siloed which is only marginally made better when the spreadsheet is on the wiki. Even more interesting, for some of the common sets of data and how it was used, what it turned out to be that a spreadsheet was the Wrong Tool.

Part of what I've done is to put another datasource behind Confluence and started to make databases of the common tabular data that many use and enjoy. Using a handful of (paid, yes) macros from Bob Swift (SQL Query and Run chief among them along with Cache to speed up some big pages). These, along with a few free macros and I've quickly made some very nice little apps on the pages that do a stellar job of what used to be in approximately 3,295 spreadsheets scattered all over the place and passed around in.... email... 

I'm not decrying your need as I understand it (and some have asked for it and may well provide it in some form but the vast majority of the "spreadsheet needs" have been supplanted by actual databases which is what the spreadsheets really were in the first place.

Hope it's some food for thought.

mike

[Deleted user]

Thanks  @Nic Brough [Adaptavist], I'll keep looking for the right add-ons.