Why isn't pagination available in Confluence tables?

[nyoungb2]

My research group uses Confluence, and we have run into the problem that large tables take a very long time to load, browse, and edit. Pagination is a very common way of dealing with the "large table" problem in browsers, so why isn't it built into Confluence tables? Moreover, I can't even find a plug-in to add pagination to Confluence tables.

My group is now looking for alternatives to Confluence, because as far as we can tell, there's no good solution for viewing and editing large tables in Confluence.

[Natalie Paramonova _Stiltsoft_]

Hi @nyoungb2 ,

The pagination feature is available in the Table Filter and Charts app now.

[weweave UG]

Although this post is quite old, we would like to let you know that we developed the app "DataTables for Confluence" (see https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1220302/datatables-for-confluence) for Confluence Cloud which adds additional table features (such pagination) to native Confluence tables.

We also have some live demos available here: https://weweave.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CONFDATATABLES/pages/897450130/Live+Demo 

[Prakhar Srivastav {Appfire}]

@nyoungb2

One way to help you is put your large table of data in excel and then use one of the plugins to display it in confluence.

• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/org.swift.confluence.excel/server/overview
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/Addteq.Excellentable/cloud/overview

You can also review this plugin :

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/27447/table-filter-and-charts-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

Regards

Prakhar

[nyoungb2]

Using excel defeats the purpose of using Confluence tables. There are good features in Confluence tables (eg., add dates, tasks, links to user profiles), but Confluence tables don't scale to big tables. So now if we have any tables that just might get too big for Confluence tables to handle, then we have to use excel or some other non-Confluence option, and we then loose all of the features of Confluence tables. Also, this means that we would have to migrate all of our existing big tables to excel and loose all of the features in those tables that will not be available in excel. This is a bad work-around for the problem that Confluence tables don't scale. 

[ecoea]

@nyoungb2 does using the Table Filter breakup the HTTP request into small chunk on demand and thereby speedup the perceived data loading performance of the page?

[Stiltsoft support]

Hi @ecoea

I'm afraid that using pagination inside the Table Filter macro won't speed up the page loading time.

But if you need to handle big tables in Confluence in a more convenient way, you may use the Table Spreadsheet macro (was added to the Table Filter and Charts macro family in Jan, 2022).

The macro will provide you with all the basic Excel-like features (cell formulas, conditional formatting, etc.).

[ecoea]

Thanks for the answer.  This is helpful when dealing with large table as it starts the alternative(s).  Another question is where is the Hide Column option in Table Filter for Confluence Cloud?  I could not find it in the Filter edit dialog.

[Stiltsoft support]

Hi @ecoea ,

Please click the "Add filter" button and select the required option from the dropdown menu:

An empty field will be added to the macro browser, and then you may choose which columns you need to hide.

Hope it helps.