Switch to old Editor possible ?

[Karsten Sarez]

We have many problems with the new Editor. We can use old sites with the old Editor but not for the new Sites. 

Its possible to switch from new to old Editor ?

[Christian Hartmann · Accepted solution]

My workaround for this is to copy existing pages. It s an easy task if I only want to add a normal extra page.

If I want to create a new space which is using the old editor I do this.

• Creat new space with new Editor
• Copy a page with the old editor and move it to the new space
• delete the overview page of the new space
• Set the page with the old editor as new Overview

It doesn't take that long so I still find it useful.

[Jan Baumann]

This has helped me so much, please make this the accepted answer! And please Atlassian listen to customers ... choice is good!

[c_robert]

Christian Hartmann THANK YOU SO MUCH for this! I was able to copy everything from a working Confluence space (configured before all of these recent editor so-called "improvements") and it worked like a charm.

[cruel]

What if you don't have access to a page with the new editor?

[Tom Crowley]

Then you're in trouble.

[Bradley Holmes]

I would have expected less of a learning curve to be able to use the new editor.  The new table is not much chop either.

[mawi]

Many editing elements; the new table, the expander, etc are terribly inferior / dont actually work in the new editor... It is really too bad, the thing is jsut not finished... </rant>

[Ian Sawicki]

I would like to see the product analytics that led to the decision to hide away this functionality. The new editor is not intuitive. 

[Bob Anson]

It does not look good for a company in the business of providing solutions for product development to release something with such a heap of quality issues. 

The new editor might have looked appealing in some mgmt sprint review but it has major bugs and lacks functionality. For ex., it is generally impossible to create a new page that will behave like an old one to augment an existing space, if it has any range of embedded elements - ex gadgets wont size properly so whole layout fails.

One could go on - but as Atlassian doesn't seem to be acknowledging the issues there's not much point.

Best workaround is just copy an old page and edit to make a "new" one

[Daryl_Sato]

agree fully.  New editor lacks polish and is missing basics..  Like FONT color!   old editor has numerous font colors to pick from and NEW editor has 7!   Font color is critical to highlight words (etc) yet the person designing the new editor choose 7.  Unbelievable!!

[Monika]

The best way to release the feature would have been to enable the old as well as the new editor at the same time. Just like the Jira board view was migrated. That would have allowed the users to use the old editor & report issues for the new view.

Also, removing any existing feature isn't user friendly. If it was not feasible to provide basic features like image editing, border, setting pixels, etc  in the current deliverable, it would have been easier to delay the deliverable or to provide the old view as well.

Too inconvenient!

[Alec Keeler]

We now have decent wide screen monitors that offer lots of working space then someone designs an editor that doesn't let you use that space properly as they think it should all be narrow and centred as that looks good on a phone!

All it needs is a simple switch that allows you to set your entire site to use the proper legacy editor as we don't try and produce our Confluence pages on our phones! 

[Ryan Wilson]

Why would you ever change the older great utilitarian page editor layout into this cloud version with stripped down capability in a white space nightmare?  The old view was truly an optimized editor layout with so many built in features.  Shame on the decision makers on this.  Shame! Shame! Shame!  If you ever find better leadership, return it and notify us so we can return to the better editor.  

[Dave Armstrong]

I have been just getting by with terrible-looking Confluence pages for like 3 years now. Today I decided to jump back in and actually try to format my Confluence pages with extensive page layouts, panels and boxes, etc. etc. etc. Looks like we are still extremely limited with what we can do with the "new" editor. I assume the old editor was ditched for technical reasons, but it is really frustrating to see 3 years pass and still encounter the same issues and limitations. 

[Sven Niedner · Accepted solution]

Any news on this? I'm still lacking a whole bunch of features and macros, and the new keyboard shortcuts are a nightmare!

[T. Wilke]

Why is the an "accetped answer"?

This issue is not solved at all?

[Moritz_Kartheuser]

People are going to leave Confluence in droves if they permanently switch to the new editor. It completely negates the reason why I create confluence pages.

Please keep the old editor at least as an option!

[Sri Krishna Devaraya Vuyyuru]

The new editor is a complete mess. Many of the useful features have been removed. Some Einsteins at Confluence must be thinking really hard as to how to make the tool more pathetic.

[Sébastien Dawans]

I dumped Confluence for good. I was never really fond of all the visual clutter in Atlassian products, but I did find a suitable workflow with Confluence that worked for me. The new editor really killed my experience. There is a long list of broken and missing features that I'm apparently not the only one to care about and which have not been addressed in over a year.

Back to my self-hosted sphinx-based HTML/PDF docs!

[Rob Lingstuyl]

DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS ATLASSIAN THIS NEW EDITOR IS SHIT

[Anya Klak]

Soon we will all move to different service providers, it is becoming more and more annoying to deal with all these surprises Atlassian offers us... I am sure competition is watching!

[Ilya Ilba]

The new editor is barely usable and missing a lot of features.

[Tom Crowley · Accepted solution]

Based on a comment Avi left on ticket 65695, Support should be able to re-enable the old editor for you as a template. Should mean you no longer have to use the workaround and can select it when creating a new page:

Hi all,

Thanks for all the feedback on this ticket. Given the amount of requests we've started to explore what a potential quick win may look like to re-introduce this. That being said, we still can't guarantee a time frame for this - we will make sure to update this ticket as we know more on our end.

In the meantime, if you have the legacy template available - which most of you should have - you can keep using that to create new pages and still keep using this feature. If you don't have that template, you can reach out to support and we'll be happy to enable it for you.

Thanks,

Avinoam

[steven.burks]

Yeah ... Please enable a roll-back guys. Many power users do NOT want the new editor. It is severely limited.

While I appreciate Christian's answer, there is no answer on this page that should be considered accepted. Who marked that inappropriately? How do we get Atlassian's attention here?

[Shawn Connelly]

I completely agree Steven.

This new editor is shockingly inept and I am extremely annoyed with Atlassian for pushing this obviously broken editor upon us.

Even simple tasks are severely broken, like tables, and simply copy/pasting from a page created with the old editor to the new editor... goodbye formatting and most macro functions!

[Rove Monteux]

It is a disaster indeed.

[Aaron Shapiro]

The new editor just doesn't seem to allow you to anything you need to do. I'm in the middle of a migration to Confluence / Jira and creating some of the templates we need just isn't possible because this editor is garbage. Also if you go look through all the open issues, you'll find tons of editor / variable issues that are marked as LOW priority and MINOR severity. 

I beg to differ with your product owner on this. Whom by the way, should be fired for letting this happen in the first place. If that person was my employee, they would be gone.  What is your QA process like over there at Atlassian? You build tools for software developers, then you role out something like this for them to use? You're being mocked now. 

I'm seeing issues related to these items open for almost a year with nothing going on. Them I'm seeing some like this that are marked as resolved that clearly are not resolved. 

How in the world did your product become "Industry Standard" with development practices like this? Price? So is it the old saying " you get what you pay for?". You're the cheapest solution out there for this so what should we expect I guess, right? 

[Jason Henriksen]

I second the "product owner should be fired over this" comment.

[Sri Krishna Devaraya Vuyyuru]

I too second that. The product owner is definitely not an earthling.

[Shawn Connelly]

Well, that's pretty severe. LOL

The real blame should be placed on the leaders who decided in the go/no-go decision to launch this inept editor. It would be more than just a single product leader that was involved in that stupid decision.

At the very least, Atlassian should issue a public apology for this gross lapse in judgement, return to the default old editor, and don't dare force a change on their paying customers until they can answer YES these three simple questions:

1. Is the new editor better in all respects?

2. Does the new editor solve a problem or problems?

3. Switching to the new editor will not cause customers any pain, with respect to  compatibility issues with the old editor?

How about it, Atlassian?

[Kim Hirschman]

Beautifully said!  Thank you.

[T. Wilke]

We urgently need the possibility to use the old editor. The new editor does not load propely, when we creat new pages. Everything is greyed out and nothnig is clickable except the "tutorial box"

[mrwizzard]

it also forces tables full width too, and you can't resize them.... at all.  there's no more "responsive" tables... it's pissing me off now.  

[Kevin Suter]

Same here, new editor has vital features missing (e.g. can't link images).

[Kelvin A Hill]

People, people, people! Atlassian isn't listening.

Atlassian has closed its Community post titled "What's New in Confluence Cloud – October 2019 Edition" (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-October-2019-Edition/ba-p/1199197)
I suspect it has been closed because the response was overwhelmingly negative.

Many customers expressed dissatisfaction over the loss of key functionality used for fine control of content and output. Similar frustrations have been expressed in individual Jira issues including:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65774
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65317
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65321
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67825

Before closing the discussion, the Atlassian Team user posted "I understand that it may take some time to adjust to the deprecation of the DIV macro."

That's really helpful. Not.

Atlassian is removing key functionality, and it is simply ignoring or glossing over the many objections without providing any type of workaround (unless finding an alternative product is a legitimate workaround).

Where I work, we have been using Confluence for over five years and have assembled a huge repository of content that has been finely customised for output to PDF from within Confluence. The prospect of migrating the content to a replacement environment and beginning the process of reformatting it is wholly unwelcome.

Atlassian isn't listening because it has a strategy to simplify the editor, and we are saying things it doesn't want to hear. Sadly, we are also voicing our objections behind closed doors, so to speak.

I believe it is time to take our frustrations to social media.

Please consider posting your objections to Atlassian media platforms, including:

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Atlassian/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/Confluence

I have just tweeted a fairly tame objection to the most recent Confluence tweet, here: https://twitter.com/Confluence/status/1192043340184862721

Here's my tweet: "I wish I could be there to express my dissatisfaction about how essential functionality has been removed from the new version of Confluence Cloud editor—and how Atlassian is offering no workarounds for long-standing customers. It is unprofessional."

I have also submitted a comment to its November 05 Facebook post: "1. Teach people to listen, not talk."

Here's my comment: "I wish Atlassian's customers could teach Atlassian to listen rather than to talk. Key functionality has been removed from the new, dumbed-down Confluence Cloud editor—functionality that is fundamental to the operations of many loyal customers. It is functionality that has been present in the product for many years, yet Atlassian has provided no workarounds—insisting only that the diminished functionality is an improvement. Following overwhelmingly negative feedback, Atlassian is keen to shut down the discussion. The best it can offer is statements like "I understand that it may take some time to adjust to the deprecation of the DIV macro." - Atlassian Team - Wednesday November 06, 2019."

If many or all of us become more vocal in Atlassian's marketing space about our objections, it may take more notice. It is worth a try.

[David Mayo]

So on one hand, at least the post acknowledges that this is in fact a depreciation of services, but on the other, stating you "understand it will take some time to adjust to the depreciated product" and just leaving it at that, doesn't really cut it. It's not very customer-centric. As a client services manager, i'd rate that response very poorly; lacking any real substance on the topic at hand, and unsympathetic. While you say you understand, your message silently screams "We don't give a crap." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ just an observation. Where is the explanation for the decision? And why aren't current clients grandfathered into being able to use the agreed upon subscription content? We signed on for the provided products and services with the understanding that we were paying for all of its current functionality as a package deal. If you change the package by taking away functionality, where's my companies return?

I mean, if Atlassian wants to try and pitch this buggy, depreciated product to new customers, and new customers agree to the terms of use at that time, then by all means, sell away. But doing this to current customers is pretty much a slap in the face. We already agreed to pay for the services and functionality available when we signed up. Where is the document we signed that said we agreed to pay the same price for the downgraded offering?

[David Mayo]

.... yeah, not impressed. I literally cannot publish. The pictures loaded into the docs won't size correctly and come out 10x larger when publishing, even though they look perfectly aligned in the editor. I cannot match my templates now because I only have a 7 color palette... seriously? Who thought that was a good idea? Kinda feels like you all took 1 step forward, then jumped all the way back to beta. Anyway... need a way to use the old editor. I guess our team will put Confluence tasks on hold while we wait for a fix... tick tick tick... 

[David Mayo]

UPDATE: for anyone interested in a temp work around, we found that if you make a copy of an old page that uses the old editor, and then rename the copy and edit it with your new content, you can still use the old editor.  :) 

[Deleted user]

Can confirm. This work around is great!

[Jonathan Brewer]

Hi, I do need to switch back to the old editor. The new one is not handling embedded PDFs correctly and this is a large part of what we do with Confluence.

[Jake Handley]

The panel macros is also not available.. and i can't copy it over from an old template either.. this is preventing me from publishing

[RicardoAraya]

Come on Atlassian!, at least let us go back until you solve the buggy new editor!
Every plugin from the marketplace is down!!

[Michael Whitson]

This seems a lot more than a shift in Editor, since I can't structure the content in the same manner that I used to - nesting macros is something I did regularly, which is no longer supported. Almost every page I have authored over the last year as a panel or a nesting which is no longer supported.  

I can't 'migrate' content. I have to RE AUTHOR EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE! It's one thing to add features and evolve the platform where there are clear customer benefits, but I am missing what those are! This has added no new features and functionality, but instead drastically REDUCED FUNCTIONALITY and ADDED WORK-LOAD to my already long list of jobs to be done.  

I have been scratching my head wondering what Atlassian is using as a success measurement.  The new editor adoption is no longer an adequate measurement because I was not provided an opt-in.  Opt out is clearly desired - I would love to see Atlassian manage these changes with better communication to customers around what benefits / problems this editor solves.  

Are product enhancements which are not desired, not backwards compatible and significantly disrupt business operations something that we get to look forward to for our other Atlassian products in the near future?! From a very loyal advocate... the lack of response here seems to be a good reason to start shopping for alternative vendors who are customer inspired. 

[Lilith Schneider]

Agreed. I don't know why they would remove so many features and macros. I was just getting the hang of confluence before this happened -_-

[Tom Crowley]

There is a lack of response everywhere. Virtually the only way to get acknowledged is to post a vapid praising comment like "Great!" on the "What's New in Confluence" posts, or to post something critical of the people responsible for creating this mess. The first way gets you a thumbs up from PM Jessica, the latter way will only serve to get you blocked.

[Michael Whitson]

I value feedback -- even the kind that is hard to hear -- because it's an opportunity to evolve and improve.  I am not here to get blocked but sincerely question how product decisions are being made... technical decisions have never been the most challenging dimension of my professional career, but rather change management and meeting customer needs.  When technology becomes the hardest problem to solve, we have lost focus of the customer, which is the only reason the product exists in the first place.   

As I double click into what's going on here, seems that technology decisions are driving with a greater weight than customer loyalty which was the driving factor to comment.  Thanks for your insights Tom & Jessica, if you read this, I am happy to share more at any time. 

[澁谷治]

Why destroy a good editor?

I feel gone back in Stone age.

[stevemc]

Yup. New editor is a major step backwards.   I tried my best to use the new editor but time and time again I was confronted with some inability that forced me to waste hours.  Often the thing I need to do is not possible any longer.  

I also have been copying old pages so as to avoid wasting time trying to get the new editor to do simple things.  Agree with others, the workaround is NOT an acceptable answer.  

Does anyone know how to modify a template to use the old editor design?  I thought I had one working that way before but it stopped and now seems to generate new-style pages. Signh...

[Jason Henriksen]

There are about 60,000 people attending AWS reInvent this year.
Atlassian is going to be there Tuesday Dec 3 at Lagsse Stadium in the Venetian.

As many people as possible should show up and tell them in person what we think of these editor problems.
https://reinvent.awsevents.com/play/

[Stefan Loble]

Just checking, did you have an opportunity to speak with Atlassian at the conference?

I share the views on this page that the new editor is crippling.

My previous habit was to:

- Drag an attachment on to a page.

- In a second tab already editing the same page, hit Insert Link to make a hyperlink to the recently added file.

Now impossible due to no hyperlinks to files. Only cumbersome thumbnails.

[Jason Henriksen]

I did talk to them.   It was really bad.

They had zero sales staff at the conference.  Instead they had a sub-contracted staff.  There were also no product managers present.

I finally got a product manager's e-mail address, and got them to write to me.   They asked for my feedback and I made a list of all the things I didn't like and referred them to this post.

I haven't heard from them since.  :(

I was very disappointed with their lack of ability to show that they understood our concerns.   I am not hopeful at this point.

[steven.burks]

Thank you for the insight here, Jason. This seems to be quite telling of their current operational focus.

Anyone know any PMs at atlassian? Anyone willing to reach out via LinkedIn and try to get some intel?

[Jason Henriksen]

I've gotten a hold of the e-mail address for a Principle Product Manager.

Let's try sending e-mail to:
azelenko@atlassian.com

That is Avinoam Zelenko.   I send him a list of complaints and a link to this page and he never wrote back.  Maybe if enough people tell him what they think, he might get the message.   

( not that I have much hope, but at least we can try )

[Kim Hirschman]

I got an email from him today.  Try messagetheceos@am.atlassian.com.

[Samrat Biswas]

The current version of the editor is not good for me at least. Can I please go back to the old one? There are many items missing. The number of colors is just 7?! really, how is that practical?

This is a very pathetic situation.

[Emma_Monks]

This new editor is absolutely terrible!  I've just tried to do two things that I was used to doing and thought was easy..but with no go:

1. On an existing (pre new editor) page I linked a heading using 'advanced link' to create a new page, published and then clicked on the link to go through and edit the new page...only nothing loaded.  I had to manually create a page and then go back and link it up.

2. On my new page I uploaded a PDF and I'm trying to do a simple thing - link to it so it can be downloaded.  So I highlighted the text portion I wanted to make into a download link for my attached PDF and, lo and behold, the link functionality in the new editor doesn't appear to have the ability to select any of the documents attached to the page

I'm now having to use the workaround everyone else is saying - duplicating old pre-new editor pages just to get back to an editor that actually has functionality worth a damn!

This is terrible Atlassian - we use Confluence as an intranet, into which we pop lots of documents that we may either link to for download, or display in-line.  We use tables and lots of other functionality it was very easy to do employ with the old editor and now appear to be gone.

[Tom Crowley]

Contact Support, they can re-enable the old template. You don't have to use the new editor if you don't want to.

[dmitry.popov]

Just some very basic things that miss in this new editor. I will update this list after I will remember the other things.

• There is no "Do not notify watchers" checkbox, state is not saved between sessions. There is no hotkey for "... → Publish without notifying watchers". As a result, all watchers are spammed on each `Ctrl + Enter` save.
• Code blocks lack tons of previous functionality:
  • Code blocks cannot have a title.
  • Code blocks cannot be expandable.
  • Code blocks cannot start from line with number non-1
  • Code blocks cannot have no line numbers.
• Table editing is a mess:
  • Cannot make a table not full-width
  • No normal background colouring.
• Lack of colours in all the colouring places (including color of the text!) Selection from several colors only
• Copy from the pages from old editor into new editor lead to a horrible layout (for example, tables around code blocks).
• Ugly "center, cut off half of the screen with gargantuan horizontal margins" page layout by default.

[Rove Monteux]

+1, also trying to make templates now is useless, as to start it off you can't get a full width template done at all.

[Jake Handley]

Another point; why are all new chapter content widths being auto adjusted to a small width in the centre... no one needs such huge margins either side of the content..

additionally.. and rather annoyingly.. linking has become somewhat of a nightmare, the search works very poor and doesn't find chapters that weren't recently viewed when trying to quick link using ctrl+k

[Cam Campbell]

There seems to be no way to import your custom css, div or span inside this new editor.

[Karsten Sarez]

So far, I have received no significant answers to this topic

[Jenni Järvinen]

I've found a way to get the old editor going.

If you have a page done with the old editor, in the top-right menu choose "Export to Word"

In the new editor, in the top-right menu choose "Import Word document" and choose the same document you exported in the previous step.

After importing the Word document into a page, just delete the contents and start with a blank page - the old editor is still in use.

PS. The link is Word document created by old editor. Worked for me!

[Alexander Panov]

I've been working at confluence for a few days.

But I immediately saw how lousy the new editor is.

I can't use blocks for texts, I can't add comments to version releases, I can't make custom panels, all instructions and training are based on the old editor.

A lot of bugs prevent me from working from the first days...

What a stupid decision?

[Jason Henriksen]

This is an invite to learn all about the new Confluence.   There are going to be product managers on the call.

https://www.atlassian.com/webinars/software/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-confluence-cloud?partnerref=email-webinar-comms1&utm_source=webinar-comms&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CCSAT_q3fy20_how_to_confluence_webinar_EML-6108&jobid=104483287&subid=1397272417

I propose we join the call and ask some very specific questions about how to do things in the new editor that were obvious and important in the old editor.   The more people join, the more questions we will be able to ask in order to make our opinion about this known.

[Tom Crowley]

Did you attend this? Feedback I heard was that any questions about whether they are going to fix the editor went largely ignored.

[Daryn Louw]

No solution, the Jira case template to show a change log is terrible, The formatting is not workable and cant be copied with statuses over to the old template. So frustrating this new interface wasting time to find workarounds of basic features which have vanished. 

[Natalie Paramonova _Stiltsoft_]

Hi everyone,

In case you faced the issue with nesting bodied macros included in the Table Filter and Charts app, please note we've resolved it on our side.

We've released a new macro - Table Toolbox. This macro allows you to combine multiple macros included in the app (Table Filter, Pivot Table, Table Transformer, Chart from Table) in the new Confluence editor.

[Aaron Shapiro]

I found that if you import a word document and then you create a new page from the word document, that new page has a very different editor than if you created the page in Confluence. 

This is painful and unfortunately all I can do is really laugh at this. So if you important a document and generate pages, those pages seem to be legacy pages.