How do I move sections up or down on the page?

Don Segien October 29, 2019

There has been a recent change to the page layout UI.

When I click on the page layout button at the top of the page, a new section is added to the page. The new section includes a mini formatting window that allows me to choose column arrangement for the section.

I cannot find any way to move sections up or down. (The page layout panel that used to appear at the top of the page no longer exists.)

 

3 answers

13 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
October 29, 2019

I'm afraid "sections" have been removed in the new editor.  We can't do them any more.  The layouts are a weaker version of them, supporting 2 or 3 columns and without any move function.

(I want sections back - the power they had for easy reformatting was far better than layouts)

Andrei Gorin December 21, 2019

+1

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Rick January 24, 2020

I agree!

Debora Birbeck February 18, 2020

Agreed, the layout feature is far too limiting. So many little things that aren't featured in Cloud (but you can do in server) that don't make sense to me as an end user to remove.

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Rosa Groot May 25, 2020

Totally Agree

Deleted user April 28, 2022

You can request the legacy editor to be added to your account. I don't believe they have any intention on fixing any bugs that exist with it though.

Erin Bailie January 24, 2024

I'm returning to Confluence after 6 years away, and I'm sad to see that one of my favorite capabilities has been removed. I hope the Confluence team will consider putting drag-and-drop page section reorder capability back into the product. 

2 votes
Rosa Groot August 3, 2020

This function is available again! 2 ways to do it:

  1. Select the whole lay-out by clicking in between columns
  2. drag&drop the whole layout. (not super fluent yet)

Also: copy/cut/paste works on the full layout.

  1. Select the Lay-Out by clicking in between columns
  2. command-X / command-C
  3. Select the Lay-Out it should move to
  4. command-V
Jeremy Richardson December 11, 2020

As of 2020-12-11, Cut/Paste for a layout worked for me after I clicked the layout on the border.  >>You have to be very precise, clicking once on the border.<<

Cut/paste works here, but the single click on the border makes no sense and took a minute of concerted effort to figure out the behavior, which is not intuitive.

elsevier_instance_0042 May 11, 2021

Thanks Rosa for pasting this trick. But wow, what a sh*tty interface design if this highly touchy/sensitive, super-hidden Easter egg is the only way to get to this function. 

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Craig Chang February 3, 2022

I can't believe how horrible this is! Are you guys serious??? who are the parties that approved this??? Totally disregard for CX. Sorry to say it, but it is pure trash!!

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Jess Richey April 28, 2022

Any tips on where I'm supposed to click to drag sections?

 

Moved companies and went from Server to Cloud and the lack of this feature is killing me. I'm used to not having to have the structure of the document perfect since I can move sections later. 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 28, 2022

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Please see the conversation in the highest rated answer above

Paul Wijnen January 4, 2024

Still the move section is not available but clicking the edge of a section allows you to drag and drop it. That works. 

1 vote
Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 29, 2019

@Don Segien @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- thanks for the feedback here! On our public roadmap here https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html we call this out as something we're keeping an eye on to see how we can improve the ease of moving layouts around a page.

Don Segien October 31, 2019

Thank you. This is a very useful feature. Please bring it back.

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cruel November 8, 2019

You legitimately removed the best feature of the editor when you decided to stop letting us easily move the layouts up and down with a click. 

Who could have possibly though that was a good idea?

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Deleted user November 27, 2019

@Avinoam It makes no sense to remove a must-have functionnaly and then "keeping an eye on to see how we can improve the ease of moving layouts around a page."

Why don't you remove sections (layouts or whatever) alltogether while you're at it.

You guys obviously didn't have UAT on this by the ones that actually use and edit pages.

Need I say more ?  

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John Paliotta December 2, 2019

Shocking that you guys would omit this feature, I use it constantly ...

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Bob Anson December 2, 2019

Ditto. You added some liteweight cosmetic tweak and killed a productivity / effectiveness tool. Yeah, I am going to copy/paste multi-chunks of multiple sections content to move it. 

 

whoever thought that adding nice "consumer" joe-simple features in favor of usability was a good move for an enterprise product needs their head and premise-making  examined. 

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The Guv December 23, 2019

I really need the following BACK

  1. relocate sections
  2. single column view
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Mark Verkerk January 17, 2020

@Avinoam The ability to have single column sections combined with the power to re-order sections was a seriously powerful tool for vast amounts of documentation.

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scott_lake February 11, 2020

@Avinoam I have published only a few things to Confluence in my company, as I've only had access to Confluence and other Atlassian tools for a couple of months and it's not my regular job function to be a content contributor or editor.

I have just come to this page because I want to re-order sections one of my contributions.

I see that it's not possible without clunky copy/paste operations.  It's quite hard to believe that is the case given the ability in other cloud-based file creation/repositories.

It makes me question whether I really want to invest ANY time using Confluence as a repository and database of useful information, if it depends upon methods from 20 years ago for content editing.  Doesn't Atlassian want it's customers to be dependent on Atlassian for serving this need?  You don't do this by making your UI and user experience something that seems like it's from 1992.  You should be able to move sections with easy operations: move section up/down arrows, grab header and drag, or something else that has a user operation that is standard these days.  

My manager has introduced the Atlassian suite to us - he comes from an agile software development world, and at this site, we do nothing with software.  He bragged on the whole suite as being so user friendly.  I'm not sure he has seen this leap backwards.

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Svane February 27, 2020

So the visuals got a makeover at the cost of functionality? My God....

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Jim Zucker April 6, 2020

Is there any way to opt out of the new UI and get the old functionality back, this is really wasting a lot of time for us..

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Sandra Chrust April 10, 2020

Agree, PLEASE allow us to move layouts around (up and down). At the moment, if we want to add a layout in the middle or move stuff around we have to COPY and PASTE content around. It's a TERRIBLE user experience. I used to be able to do this and now it is impossible. Bring the feature back please. The old way was way better.

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Sandra Chrust April 10, 2020

Yes, and please allow layouts with one column!!!!

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Jennifer April 30, 2020

 

when will the ability to move layout function come back??

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Al Mele August 2, 2020

Already said by many others, but the ability to reorder sections is hugely convenient.  On my personal Confluence I now have this inferior functionality. Thankfully at work I have the server version which continues to support the move functionality.

Please reinstate that functionality to the cloud product.

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Sam Deacon August 3, 2020

Reordering sections is an absolute must. Hundreds of hours of work in building our internal knowledge base leveraging the ability to reorder sections is obsolete with this critical functionality removed. Very disappointed with this.

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