First time user seeking guidance

[Maarten-Jan Waasdorp]

Hi, I am very new to Confluence. How did you learn your way through this tool to become the expert you are right now?

[Florian PEREZ]

Hello and welcome in the Atlassian world ! 

You want to discover confluence and even if the software is very simple to use as a basic user, becoming an expert as user or administrator still a challenging job ! 

You’ll be happy to know that there is no better place than the documentation to learn all the basisc and most of the advanced topic of Confluence. 

You can find additional sources by looking at Atlassian university. You’ll find a lot of course showing a lot of différents topic in a very well explain way ! 

Hope you get good time with all the Atlassian tool ! 

[Carolina SILVA]

hello @Maarten-Jan Waasdorp , the best for me to start learning and understanding is to watch some videos. There are plenty of beginners videos to explain the basics... if your watch some of them (do not need to watch all) you'll start to know some Confluence abilities.

Then, create your space test and create some pages, use insert (/) to add some options on your page and see the result.

Look also for shortcuts, they are useful and you can use them and also share it to your teams, they will love it too :-) 

Enjoy your Confluence journey :-) 

[Andy Gladstone]

Welcome to Confluence @Maarten-Jan Waasdorp! This is a life changing moment for you. Take a deep breath and survey your surroundings - you'll want to remember this in the years to come!

Atlassian University has some great free (and paid) resources. I highly recommend you take the Confluence Fundamentals course, which is free, recently revamped, and an excellent primer for how to use Confluence. 

Atlassian University 

I also recommend you create a personal Space in your Confluence instance and just start playing there with creating, editing, formatting and using macros for pages and content - hands on experience is the best experience to learn from!

And of course, keep coming back here with questions and we'll be here to support you on your journey!

[Meg Bailey]

Hi @Maarten-Jan Waasdorp and welcome! 👋 Echoing others' support for the Confluence Fundamentals guide from Atlassian University. The Confluence Product Guide is also a great place to start. It has tons of resources linked – everything from a Quick start guide to use-case specific guides (like documentation and content management), videos and blog posts. 

[Amelia Giuliani]

I watched some of the university videos and documentation that Atlassian has but honestly, the best way I learn is by doing. I started by deciding how to organize content - is a space a team, or a project, or what? Do I need special permissions to view some documents, etc. Map it out and it will make sure you stay on track. 

Then I started to use the templates to get ideas and see how I wanted to organize things. Then I started importing word documents of processes we had or copying and pasting information first. 

As you get more comfortable with things using the / to pull macros is really useful. 

Confluence is extremely user friendly so the more you use it, the more comfortable you will be with it. 

[Maarten-Jan Waasdorp]

Guys, thank you all for your great suggestions. I'll get going and will be back for more, I am sure!

[Stephanie Zhang _Product_]

@Maarten-Jan Waasdorp Hey there! My name is Stephanie Zhang and I'm with the Confluence team. Would you be willing to speak to us about your experience onboarding? As a token of appreciation we can offer you a $70 giftcard.

Let me know your availability at szhang5@atlassian.com if you're interested!

Thanks,
Steph