Confluence: 5 quick things that you need

As part of my work experiments, this week I would like to write down the things that one needs to know in confluence that can up-skill their documentation works. I will cover the following 5 things,

1. How to Anchor link a title?
2. How to Anchor link to a section?
3. How to create a dashing dashboard?
1. Panel - Confluence Macro
2. Layouts - Confluence Tools
3. Content by Label - Confluence Macro

1. How to Anchor link a title?

This is the most required thing. Most useful when one has to refer to a section internally on the same confluence page.

Let's consider you have a page with three different sections and titles as shown below,

In this, if you want to add an internal anchor from a text in paragraph 3 to a title in paragraph 1, you can add it as follows,

• Choose the word that needs Anchor
• Click on the link icon from the Toolbar above
• In the link box, enter #Page Title 1
• Click Insert

That is it. Your anchor from the selected text to Page Title 1 is ready. This can be tested out in the preview itself.

2. How to Anchor link to a section?

To do this, you need to add an anchor from the Macro as follows,

• Place your cursor to where the link should navigate to
• Click on the "+" menu in the toolbar > Choose Other macros

• In the appearing popup, search for "anchor" and choose it in the appearing result

• Now, on the appearing screen, type an anchor name and click Insert

• Once done, choose a word as mentioned in the first section to create the link and click on the insert link option from the toolbar, in the appearing link box, type as shown in the below screenshot:

Tada. Your anchor to the desired section is ready.

3. Creating a dashing dashboard

To create a dashing dashboard on confluence, all that we need is a couple of built-in macros as follows,

1. Panel
2. Layouts
3. Content by Label

With the help of the three of the macros above, we will build a cool dashboard down this article. Before we start, let us consider the following content on our page,

3.1 Panel - Confluence Macro

First, let us look at creating a Panel in a confluence page. This panel will help you categorize anything on your dashboard page. To add a panel, follow the steps below,

• Select the text you need to put inside a panel
• Click on the plus available on the toolbar above and choose "Other macros" as indicated below,

• In the appearing window, search for Panel and choose the indicated one in the following screenshot

• For the panel configuration, I will fill some of them and preview as indicated in the below screenshot,

• When this is done, we can remove the Bookmarks title from the page as it comes with the panel itself and preview the page as shown in the below screenshots,

• To get contrasting colours of the same shade, you can use any online colour palette. I use: https://www.color-hex.com/color-palettes/
• We will first add all four of the sections with similar panels following the above steps:

There we go. We've successfully setup the panels for our unorganised links. 

3.2 Layouts - Confluence Tools

Although we have the panels in place to separate each section, there is a lot of free-space that can be made use of. Therefore, we shall try to use confluence layouts to organize them.

• Edit the dashboard and click on Layouts icon from the Toolbar
• A default layout is setup for the whole page and a sub-toolbar appears
• Now, click on + Add Section and then ꜛ Move up

• The newly appearing section can be split using the split sub-tools. I will split into 3 equal sections
• Once done, we shall drag and drop the 3 panels into each of these split sections as shown below,

At this point, I would like to extend my thanks to Adam Ranganathan, from whose dashboards this dashboard was inspired.

3.3 Content by Label - Confluence Macro

We already have a neat dashboard of links. We shall now try to use this macro to automatically pull in links to other confluence pages based on their labels.

• We will first split the Second Layout into two using the Layout Sub-tool
• Once done, create an empty panel as shown below,

• Now that we have created a panel, let us add a Content by Label Macro inside
• To do so, click inside the panel and add the following Macro,

• Let us suppose you have classified some of the confluences as meetings-wiki by adding labels. You also have additional label called meetings-wiki-review for the documents under review. Now, in your dashboard, you need handy links for all the confluences under meetings-wiki that are not under review. To get that done, we shall do the following,

• In the above screenshot, to include the wikis, I've added the label: meetings-wiki
• Similarly, to exclude the wikis under review, I've added the label with a negate: -meetigns-wiki-review
• One can also choose to Add other filters and also customise how it should look. I prefer the default settings for them.
• Once inserted, this is how it appears in the page,

• When published, you can see the wiki links appearing as follows,

So, those are the five top of the mind things about confluence I wanted to share with everyone.