Create content that's superior to the rest on Confluence Cloud

What is Confluence and how should I use it?

Teams all over the world use Confluence to plan, document and share important information. Whether that’s by creating entire Confluence wikis that act as organisational intranets or simply sharing a few key pages with your immediate team, Confluence has a variety of professional uses. However, we can sometimes get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information we have to deal with and provide to others. This can lead to creating or documenting information in a way that doesn't engage as we envisaged.

This gif gives you all the proof you need. No one wants text-heavy, unstructured and hard to follow Confluence pages! Instead, create more meaningful content that is easy to read and consume by making the design more eye-catching, structuring the page so that it's easily navigable, or drawing attention to key information by adding an element to it.

Sound good? It gets better. What you see above is just a taste of what can be achieved with Content Formatting Macros. To discover more, let’s take a closer look at how you can use Content Formatting Macros to optimise your content on Confluence Cloud.

Six clever Content Formatting Macros that will transform your content

1. Progress Bar macro

The Progress Bar macro lets users create a user journey and provides visualisation for documented processes in Confluence. This could be an onboarding process for new employees created by the HR team or documenting an events plan that can be shared with the wider marketing team.

2. Tabs macro

The Tabs macro lets users break down those long, congested content pieces into easily digestible tabs. This makes your Confluence page cleaner and easier for the reader to follow and navigate.

For example, when creating a marketing plan, many Confluence users tend to have all the information sequentially on a single page or they elect to create multiple child pages in an effort to break it down into relevant sections. With the Tabs macro, users get the best of both worlds. They can now have all the information on the page, but neatly segmented into relevant sections.

Extra for experts: For insider tips on maintaining a tidy and organised Confluence across large organisations, check out our Ultimate Admin Guide.

3. Tooltip macro

Give the reader more context by adding the Tooltip macro to any element on your page. The tooltip text is displayed as the user hovers over the tooltip indicator or clicks on it. It’s a great way of providing extra information to a specific part of your content, without over congestion.

4. Buttons macro and Buttons Group macros

The Buttons macro allows you to create a single stylised button, hyperlinked to other pages or websites. The Buttons Group macro is used in conjunction with the Buttons macro, allowing users to create a group of stylised hyperlink buttons in a toolbar-like display. This is a great way to draw attention to specific parts of your content that require the reader to navigate to an external site.

5. Footnotes macro

Footnotes is a pair of macros that lets users reference and display extra or supplementary information within texts written in Confluence. This is particularly useful for users writing academic texts, journals or reports in Confluence.

6. LaTeX macro

The LaTex macro allows users to insert complex mathematical formulas directly in Confluence. Whether it’s inline or block formulas, they are easy to insert and are presented neatly on the page.

Ready to start improving your space? You might want to clean things up first. Read our blog on how to delete a page in Confluence for more content formatting tips.