Table Sorting on Confluence Cloud

[Torfinn Olsen]

Am I crazy or have the new Confluence cloud pages removed the ability to sort tables? Our old pages and tables still sort, but anything new we create is no longer sortable. I know the table filter macro is great and cheap but I don't have approval for any budget on this project and losing the ability to sort tables makes a dent in my ability to pitch Confluence as a serious solution.

Has any one else noticed this? Is it by design?

[Daniel Eads · Accepted solution]

Greetings all! I just wanted to let you know in case you hadn't already seen - the new editing experience in Confluence Cloud allows you to sort tables when viewing pages. The sort handles both alphabetical and numerical sorting, descending and ascending. Just click the ⬇️icon in your table headers.

Cheers! | Daniel at Atlassian

[Sumedh Inamdar]

Finally! This was my biggest annoyance against Confluence.

[Maoz_Friedman]

It seems like you can only sort in the published 'viewing' mode which gets reset every time you refresh the page or a new user arrives at the page.

Is there a way to sort the table in 'edit' mode?

[RickMeasham]

Hi @Daniel Eads, is there any roadmap to adding sort in edit mode? Or even a default sort in view mode so it's always sorted for the viewer even if it isn't for the editor? 

Edit: The roadmap has CONFCLOUD-29816. But that has been closed as won't fix. CONFSERVER-28787 is "Not being considered". Please can you provide an update? At least the roadmap needs to be updated :( 

[Therese Reade]

Re sorting in edit mode; being able to sort in edit mode would be very helpful, I sorted my table in published version and then opened in edit and the sort had been ignored. Very irritating. Is it possible to have the last sort in published version the default for when you go into edit mode?

[Russell Zera]

I would also love to have the functionality to sort in "Edit" so the sorting persists for visitors, or to be able to define a "default sort" in the column drop-down options or something. I remember the 2019 Atlassian Summit, one of the "Ship-It Live" functionalities was a more robust Confluence Tables functionality that had things like sorting, row/column sums, and a slew of other basic spreadsheet functionality available. What they showed was so promising and exciting, I wish it was possible to the have them "Ship It" already ;-) 

Please consider rolling this out, it would make this so much more useful of a feature in Confluence Cloud without having to purchase a third party add-on just to enable a basic table functionality that I can imagine would benefit all users almost immediately.

[Russell Zera]

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-28787 

For anyone interested in "Voting" for this "Gathering Interest" ticket :-) 

[Gabby Molinolo]

I'd love to add a comment to that ticket... if it didn't consistently give a server connection error.

Please please implement this. It feels like it's a basic request. It's very silly to have to manually rearrange rows in tables

[Peter Wormald]

You can comment - the url is mangled if you click the above hyperlink, remove the end of the address from .../CONFCLOUD-28787%C2%A0 to .../CONFCLOUD-28787

[Daniel Eads · Accepted solution]

Hey Torfinn,

I suspect you're using the new Cloud Editor which currently doesn't let you sort tables. This is on the short-term roadmap though and new features are constantly being added to the new editor. Once the feature is available it will move from the roadmap to the first link which lists shipped features.

If watching issues on jira.atlassian.com is more your thing, we've also got a feature request open there that you can watch: CONFCLOUD-64966. Just noting that since this is already on the short-term roadmap, unlike other issues in jira.atlassian.com there is no need to vote on this one.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Torfinn Olsen]

Thanks Daniel!

[Peter Graff, MA, PhD]

Please hurry up with this functionality! Thank you!

[Nick McWilliam _MapAction_]

Hi Daniel,

Is this available now please, i.e. automatic table sorting in edit mode? Apologies if I'm missing something; it's not obvious anyway!

Thanks.

[RickMeasham]

Not only has this not been implemented but they've moved it to the long term backlog. 

Not only is it now on the long term backlog but they built a new feature (databases) that has exactly the same problem. 

[Rose]

Hi, I still have this problem, even on a newly-created page. I also still see "Sort content in table" under Coming soon on the Confluence Cloud Editor Roadmap, so I guess no progress this month.

In case this idea helps anyone else who needs a workaround so the table appears to to be sortable, here's how I'm faking it for now: in each table cell, precede the (*) icons with their number. For example, if the cell contains 3 stars add a number 3 before the stars. Then change the number's color to white, making the white number invisible in a white table cell. With all the invisible numbers in place, the column can be sorted by the up and down arrows in the header; it looks like it's sorting the stars, but it's only sorting the invisible numbers that precede the stars. It's ugly but it doesn't look ugly, so it makes the page good enough to show other people for now. 

[Matteo Pacenti]

Is this still working or lately Atlassian changed something? my tables are not sortable any longer!!

[Gina Saccoman]

Yeah this is BROKEN!!! You can not sort anymore! What happened? 

[Sena Ozbek]

It's really difficult to work with the tables with multiple rows, will there be a fix?

[Kari Toivonen]

Hi @Daniel Eads 

Any news on when this feature will be added, another 6 weeks or so have passed since this was asked the last time? Or if the feature is not coming very soon, could you advice if is possible to change the page template to not use the new editing experience? I would not want to delete my pages and create new ones because of this issue.

Thanks.

[Louise Niemann Hansen]

Any news on the sort table?

We are currently making a demo on the use of confluence for documentation and knowledge base, but the lack of sort in a table is making it hard to make a strong proof of concept.

[Sumedh Inamdar]

Why is this still not available? This makes the tables unusable! :(

[Patrik Björkman]

Any update on this ?, sorting on a table feels like an basic function to have..

[Deleted user]

Hi @Torfinn Olsen

A silly question though I have a to ask. Are the latest tables you have created using headers?

Thanks

[Torfinn Olsen]

Not a silly question at all! They most certainly are though.

[Deleted user]

Hi @Torfinn Olsen

Are there any merged cells in the table? 

[Rose]

Hi, I have some tables in Cloud Confluence where I can sort every column except one that's populated by icons such as (*). In this little test table, I can sort by every column except count. After sorting by any other column, asking to sort by count puts that column back in its original order (shown) but that's all: it never sorts by the number of stars, much less swapping between ascending and descending order.

I can't prove that this used to work, but I think it did. I just noticed the problem today. 

[Deleted user]

Hi @Torfinn Olsen & @Rose

I have shouted out to the other Champions who may perhaps have more answers. I think this is a new bug introduced to Confluence Cloud however I would like to be incorrect. 

Apologies I cannot be any further assistance.

[Torfinn Olsen]

Sorry for not responding sooner, yeah no merged cells either! Also a good guess though.