How to Create an Interactive Task Reporting Table in Confluence Cloud

Confluence Cloud is a new step of Atlassian towards the team collaboration platform. It has incorporated all the best features of Confluence Server and revamped the approaches to content editing and user experience.

Anyway, there are things that can be further improved for the end-users. In this post, we will show you a quick way to create a task reporting table in Confluence Cloud with the minimal efforts, without ads and registration 🙂

Creating a table in Confluence Cloud

Let’s just create a blank table with the following columns:

1. Task — here we will keep a description of our tasks.
2. Assignee — mention of the user who is responsible for a task.
3. Priority — priority of a task.
4. Status — status of a task.
5. Component — component of a project which a task impacts.
6. Due date — due date of a task.

A blank table for a start

Let’s just add a few tasks to see how they will be looking in our table. For better perception of information, we use the star emoji to indicate the progress, the status macro to show the status and component, and the date macro to show the due date.

Our table filled with tasks

Now our table with tasks looks much better and we can more easily find the information we are interested in. The main problem is that we can change information only in the page edit mode. Let’s try to find out a way how to make our table interactive in the page view mode.

Taking advantage of the Handy Macros app

To add more interactivity to your tables, you can use the Handy Macros app. Let’s see how it can help you.

An easy way to create status sets

We just create three sets, as follows:

• Task priority — a set with task priorities. Here you can use the emojis to indicate the priority. You can get the required emojis at emojipedia.org.
• Component — a set with components which a task attributes to.
• Task progress — a set with task statuses for indicating the current progress.

Let’s just add them to our reporting table and see what our table will look like now. You need to insert the Handy Status macro and fill out each column with macros pointing to the sets you created. When complete, let’s save the page and see how you can change the values in the table now.

Updating information in the page view mode

You can click the value and change it for another one in the page view mode. So you needn’t edit the page all the time to make some minor updates in the task status.

What else can you do to make the table even more interactive? Let’s replace the default Date macro with the Handy Date macro and see how it improves our experience.

Using the Handy Date macro

Here you can pick the due date and enable the Macro coloring to visualize tasks that are approaching their due dates so that you can ensure that all the tasks will be completed on time and your colleagues will not miss them.

Picking the date in the page view mode

Is it better now? We hope that yes. Add more interactivity to your pages with the help of Handy Macros.

Keep following our posts and find more solutions to design and use interactive tables in Confluence Cloud.