Confluence is a place where we create, organize and discuss work with our teams. But that’s what Atlassian says.
Most of us not only use Confluence for collaboration, documentation or as a Knowledge Base but also as a place to create drafts, write reports, take meeting notes, assign tasks or even scribble some text when a physical-notepad is not available. In fact, Confluence is an integral part of team-work, but it lacks one thing. Dynamic and effective tables.
Current tables in Confluence
Tables are ubiquitous in any knowledge base, but Confluence tables lack a punch. Does the image below look similar to any of your Confluence pages?
Now imagine editing the first table; every entry needs to be entered correctly because a single incorrect entry will make you redo the whole table again. Even worse, imagine making just one mistake in the serial number in the first column and the amount of rework even this minor mistake would require.
The usual solution to this problem is to create a template in Excel or Google Sheets and then simply copy & paste. While both these tools are great in their own instances, they do not integrate well with Confluence. Furthermore, both of these approaches are restrictive if your Knowledge Base is large.
An ideal spreadsheet in Confluence
According to Confluence users on the Atlassian Community Portal, the best spreadsheets in Confluence require three things:
- Spreadsheets that sit right inside Confluence, so that we do not need to shift tabs every time an edit is required.
- The spreadsheet should have similar formatting sets and formulas to native spreadsheet software.
- Since Confluence allows collaborative editing, the spreadsheet tool should also provide the same to users.
Excellentable:
Excellentable provides all the above things and so much more.
- Nativity: Excellentable allows users to create dynamic and interactive spreadsheets directly in Confluence. You can take advantage of familiar spreadsheet functionalities within a Confluence browser. Secondly, as a native spreadsheet, it also carries the permission levels of the Confluence page, so you don’t have to worry about giving or revoking permissions in an MS-Excel or Google Sheets document.
- Familiarity: Excellentable has multiple sheets, easy referencing, a vast set of formulas, and a very rich formatting set, so there is no need to retain resources on using a spreadsheet. You can also import and export spreadsheet files (in XLS, XLSX, and CSV format) into Excellentable without needing to change formatting or formulas.
- Collaborative editing: Excellentable also allows multiple users to edit the sheet concurrently. Please note that editing is currently hosted externally on a Google Firebase server, so you will need to have external connections enabled in Confluence,4441to use this feature.
- Version Control: Every time the ‘Save’ button is used, Excellentable creates a copy of the sheet and retains the document history, allowing for clear versioning capabilities.
- Other nifty features: Since Excellentable is hosted in Confluence, you can do a lot more. You can share your searches with your teammates with just a click of a button. You can create templates for the whole Confluence page, including the spreadsheet, for things like proposals, documentation, test lists, etc. Excellentable also supports native and scroll PDF exports, so your exports will always look great.
Here is a video to introduce you to Excellentable followed by a second video to show you how to get started:
Don’t have Excellentable installed on your Confluence instance just yet?
