How can I define table headings in an existing table in Confluence 4.0?

[Deleted user]

Looks like someone didn't get the table heading feature in Confluence 4.0 and used highlighting instead. For someone like me who noticed the subtle difference between the two this is annoying. But I couldn't find another way to create the heading than to recreate the table. Is there another way?

[Andrew Frayling · Accepted solution]

Hi Eirik,

I'm not sure if I fully understand the question, but the first row in a table inserted in Confluence 4 uses <th> tags whether the row is highlighted or not. If someone has removed the highlighting from the first row of a table you can add it again by placing the cursor in the first row of the table and clicking the "Highlight Row" button. All this is doing is changing the generated HTML from:

<th class="nohighlight confluenceTh">

to:

<th class="confluenceTh">

So you can toggle the highlighting on and off and it still uses <th> tags for the first row rather than <td> tags without having to recreate the table.

All other rows in the table use <td> tags and if you delete the first row completely and reinsert it will use <td> tags.

Hope this helps,

Andrew.

[Deleted user]

Thanks for the info, the <th> tags was part of my worries wrt exporting the page to a file.

Still, highlighting the first row made the text dark blue which is normal for highlighting. If the table is created with a heading the text is black (and bold), although the shading is the same. Since I noticed it looks like headings and highlighting are two different concepts, but only the higlighting can be changed back an forth.

[Andrew Frayling]

If you're seeing a visual difference between table headings and highlights it sounds like you're overriding stylesheets at either the space or global level. On a vanilla install the CSS for both a highlighted <th> and a highlighted <td> is the same:

color: #000000;
background-color:#F0F0F0;
font-weight:bold;

Is there anything defined in Browse -> Space Admin -> Stylesheet or Browse -> Confluence Admin -> Stylesheet that is overriding table.confluenceTable td.confluenceTd.highlight or table.confluenceTable th.confluenceTh ?

[Deleted user]

Nope, nothing is defined in either place. And the install is pretty fresh and we haven't touch the styling. Are you sure about the CSS? I don't see anything strange about displaying the headers differently from highlight.

Think I'll ask the one who made the table in the first place. Can't really reproduce the thing.

[Andrew Frayling]

What I meant was if you're using the "Highlight Row" button in the editor and it's doing something other than black, bold text with a shaded background then someone may have overriden the CSS, but if there's nothing in the Space or Global stylesheets then that's not the case.

Whoever made the table may just have selected the rows in the table and used the colour picker in the editor to change the colour of the font.

[Deleted user]

Perhaps. Maybe it was a bit unclear, but highlighted rows always have dark blue text, not black. It is the only thing I have observed, it has never been identical.

[Deleted user]

Still unanswered. Don't think it is a big deal since you can't (to my knowledge) create a table without the heading row. It is possible to delete the row, but then you are stuck with highlighting to make it a heading again. And it is not the same.