New to Confluence; some ideas based off 2 months of use.

[Erin]

I've been using Confluence to write SOPs for the past 2 months. I had some ideas for improvements/Quality of life changes.

• Ability to add custom footers with certain pages in a space. Example: I had eleven child pages under a parent that needed a disclaimer added (not all pages in the space needed this). It would have been convenient to just add the disclaimer to the parent and have it apply to all children rather than individually add them.
• Ability to switch to and from live view on macros in edit mode. Example: adding a table of contents you must preview/publish to see how it looks. I'd prefer to be able to toggle back and forth to see what the ToC would look like live while still in edit.
• Colorful text boxes/formatting options in info panels. A colorful text box to stand out from the body of the text is useful at times. Info panels work in a pinch, but not all formatting options are allowed.
• Improved tables.
• More fonts/color choices.
• Better image formatting options.

These are a few of the major 'wants' that would vastly improve my experience in Confluence. The lack of customization id definitely a headache at times.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Erin Trahan Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Thank you for sharing your experience. Have you checked https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD for any of your suggestions that may have previously been submitted so you can vote on them?

A few comments/requests for clarification:

• Ability to add custom footers with certain pages in a space.
  • Have you considered using the excerpt macro to accomplish this? It won't automatically propagate on the child pages, but will save the extra typing or copying and pasting, and you can update the excerpt in one place and change it everywhere
• Ability to switch to and from live view on macros in edit mode.
  • Yes this. Previews of macros have long been something that would improve the edit/publish experience!
• Colorful text boxes/formatting options in info panels. 
  • Interested in understanding why you think the panels macro cannot accomplish this. What are the limitations? How would a colored text box change this?
• Improved tables.
  • This is in flight and there have been plenty of recent updates, with more coming - particularly with Confluence Databases on the horizon.
• More fonts/color choices.
  • Part of the Confluence experience is the standardization and simplicity, what can't you accomplish with bold, underline, italics, etc. that requires a different font family?
• Better image formatting options.
  • Please expand on this. What would you like to see?

Thanks again, keep sharing!

[Erin]

Hello Andy, thanks for the response!

• I looked into the excerpt macro and I'll use it in the future to see if it helps with my issue. Its not exactly what I was looking for, but better than the copy/paste.
• The panels macro does accomplish the "text box," I'd just like the ability to change alignment within it/add pictures/tables. These are minor wants, it would just make some SOPs more aesthetically pleasing.
• For the fonts, I misspoke a bit. While more fonts would be nice, I mostly want to be able to change font size (without using heading options.) It would make things cleaner. I understand standardization is part of Confluence, but creative control is far more important, at least to me.
• For images, I'd like more sizing options, more boarder colors/thickness, and improvements to how an image acts when formatted in-line with text. It can be quite frustrating at times when trying to move the image where it needs to go on the page and it resizing itself/going somewhere unintended/making the text look strange.

While most of these are small quality of life changes, it would certainly make my own experience better, and probably other newcomers to Confluence.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

I think most (all?!) of these short-comings can be solved with apps!

I strongly suggest you have a look on the Atlassian Marketplace. There are apps for colorful boxes (panels), improved tables, images and pretty much every common need.

[Erin]

Thanks for the tips! I agree that the apps would solve a lot of issues, but with the size of the company (>1000) + cost vs. utility vs. budget, its not a realistic solution at this time.