What is the difference between the Excerpt & Multiple Excerpts macros?

[Heather Blue]

Everything I've read said the only difference was that multiple excerpts allows one to have more than one excerpt in a page, however you can use excerpt keys and therefore use more than one excerpt too, so I'm not sure what the difference is between the two?

I know there are some slight formatting differences between the two and how they look, but is that it? Or are there other differences?

I use Confluence cloud.

[Katerina Kovriga {Stiltsoft}]

Hi @Heather Blue ,

Our app that is Table Filter and Charts for Confluence app also provides multiexcerpt macros - Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include.

The macros allow you to give names to your Excerpts, collect several Excerpts from one page and automatically get Excerpts from

• Page and child pages;
• Page and all descendants;
• Pages with specific labels.

Besides, our macros allow you to show additional metadata via the Table Excerpt Include macro such as source page title (link), parent page, space, labels, excerpt, author, last modifier, created, updated.

So, we can say that these macros are a more flexible and advanced version of the standard Excerpt/Excerpt Include and Page Properties/Page Properties Report macros.

[Bill Bailey]

Hello @Heather Blue , the excertp is builtin while the multi-excerpt is a paid plugin. The main difference is that with multiexcerpt you can name each excerpt AND have mulitple on one page.

I have used the multi-excerpt quite sometime now. My standard use model is to have one page in the space (e.g. _includes) at root level where all the excerpts are kept -- makes them much easier to find and manage. 

[Heather Blue]

Oh I see. Maybe I added the multiple excerpts macro plugin. If it is paid though I wouldn't have been able to.

From testing the excerpt macro out, you can name each excerpt and have multiple on one page, so I'm not sure how that is different from the multiple excerpts?

[Bill Bailey]

Ah, I think they changed the functionality of the native excerpt macro. The differences are probably now more in performance (multiexceerpt has a caching function) and the UI. But are very similar now.

[Heather Blue]

Okay awesome, that makes sense. One of the atlassian pages I read when Googling for an answer said that you can only have 1 excerpt but they must've changed that since you can have more than 1 now using the excerpt keys. Formatting is the only discernible difference, and caching, although I'm unfamiliar with that. Thanks for following up!

[Rafi Ahmad]

@Katerina Kovriga {Stiltsoft} 
going by this post, what actually is the difference between Excerpt and Table Excerpt? I believe I can still fetch table with excerpt so why should I use table excerpt? 

[Katerina Kovriga {Stiltsoft}]

Yes, you can fetch tables and text abstracts both by Excerpt/Excerpt Include and Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include macros.

The difference is that the latter pair allows you to show metadata for the source pages (page title, author, created, etc.) and show as many excerpts from the source page as you need (this feature was recently introduced to the Excerpt Include macro in Cloud, but not in Server/Data Center as far as I know).

And with the Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include macros you'll be able to automatically collect excerpts by labels (like in Page Properties Report but for multiple-row tables), on child pages and all descendants.

[Katerina Kovriga {Stiltsoft}]

Hi there,

As this thread mentions our Table Filter and Charts for Confluence app, we are happy to introduce its new macro – Table Spreadsheet.

The macro allows you to work with fully functional Excel spreadsheets right in Confluence.

You’ll be able to use cells’ formulas, filters, conditional formatting, etc., create pivot tables and charts from the page view and edit mode.

The Table Spreadsheet macro is available for Cloud and Server/Data Center.