Confluence Best Practices
The Power of Icons in Confluence
Visuals speak louder than words. That’s why we’re going to show you how to elevate
We know every word in every piece of content you craft is important. If it wasn’t, why else write them? Many times, though, some of those words and phrases are just slightly more important than the others, and you want to set those apart and draw attention to them specifically.
And that’s what we mean by highlighting in this article’s context. It’s not just the formatting tool that mimics placing a brightly colored band over text as such, but also the formatting tools within Confluence we use that otherwise call attention to and suggest “you might want to pay particular attention to this!”
If you’re looking for a quick way to start a heated discussion among Confluence users, inquire about the best way to highlight text on the platform. If it were for purposes just as simple as shown above — to give the most basic visual formatting cue of highlighting, that’d be one thing — but there are other reasons to want to emphasize specific portions of content;
Let’s start with highlighting via an identification method, in this case, we’ll describe how to use Confluence’s macros to indicate a status or priority level.
When you boil it down, if you’re a Confluence user, you’re most likely part of a team, and being part of a team means you’re dealing with deadlines and due dates.
There are two ways you can add a status or priority highlight to a page. The first is when you’re at the title for the page in Edit mode. In the example above, you’ll see we’re positioned at the start of the page and when at the page title, the menu presented offers a status option. You can choose from the drop-down there.
If you’re further within the body of the Confluence page, simply call the Status macro in edit mode by typing the backslash / and then status. You can then select one of five colors to customize and name it either as a status, a priority, or whatever you’d like. Once complete, the Status macro will appear on a Confluence page to highlight the status.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to highlight words or sections of text content and make them stand out is to simply select them in Edit mode, and choose a different color. While certainly not the most prominent way to call attention, this can be an effective way to break up the flow of text and white space with a splash of color to draw the reader’s attention.
Confluence’s included Panel macro offers six different types to choose from;
These panels appear as colored blocks or texts/backgrounds where text and other content can be displayed, each offering a level of customization of background colors and icons. You have the flexibility to add multiple lines of text, as well as change the size of the text to have both headlines and subsequent content. The panels auto-adjust the width of your Confluence page’s content to keep a consistent look and feel.
We saved this one for the last of the built-in functions for highlighting within Confluence, as it’s really not a technique built for the convenience of the reader, but more so the content creators and editors. That being said, it does highlight text in what most would consider as the original concept of “highlighting text” akin to our school days; however, it comes with some drawbacks.
If there is a great deal of text to highlight on a page using the commenting feature, it can quickly become cluttered, making it difficult to read. It also looks somewhat unprofessional to use what is really an editing tool for the purpose of a design need, particularly if this will be something individuals outside of your organization will need to access. And a final note, the highlighted text only stays as such if and while the comments are left as unresolved. If and when they are marked as “resolved”, the comment and thus the highlighting is removed.
So we’ve taken a look at the macro and feature options for highlighting already included with Confluence, now, let’s take a look at a stand-out, third-party app; Aura Content Formatting Macros from appanvil.
Aura isn’t just one macro, it’s a full suite of formatting macros for Confluence cloud. With everything from customizable buttons, cards, panels, status, backgrounds, dividers, and more, you can create highly appealing and engaging page designs to take your Confluence instance to the next level.
Using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page creation, either from scratch or from hundreds of templates, it’s simply drag-and-drop to achieve a new level of creativity in Confluence.
And since we’re on the topic of highlighting text, the Aura Panel macro gives you the ability to highlight your content in a format that is both easier-to-read and more attractive. Customize everything from the text header (title, icon, alignment, etc.) to the shape, size, and color of the panel itself.
You can try Aura for free to see just how powerful it is. If you have ten or fewer users on your Confluence instance, it’s free forever under Atlassian’s cloud pricing model. Either way, we think you’ll find Aura’s incredible set of macros not only useful for your highlighting needs, but for all your Confluence formatting efforts.
This article explored various ways to highlight text in Confluence. Let’s recap the options and who they’re best suited for:
We hope this has helped give you a wide variety of options to highlighting or calling attention to, content within your pages. Give them all a try, as using all these tools will help make your content stand out from the crowd. Enjoy a new level of creativity in Confluence!
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