Introduction

Welcome to the Confluence Basic Training page, designed to help you quickly get up to speed with Confluence Data Center Environment.
Confluence is a collaboration wiki tool used to help teams to collaborate and share knowledge efficiently.  Dynamic pages gives a team a place to create, capture, and collaborate on any project or idea.

This page will serve as your starting point for:

• Navigating spaces and content hierarchies efficiently

• Learning the basics of page creation, formatting, and structuring

• Applying permissions and restrictions appropriately

• Leveraging collaboration features such as comments, mentions, and inline discussions

Whether you’re a new contributor, a space administrator, or part of the technical team, this training reference will help you work productively and maintain the quality and consistency of our knowledge base.

Looking for more training material, visit Atlassian Confluence Data Center documentation.

Training material can be found under: 

• How-to articles Confluence

Confluence Site navigation

Use the site navigation menu to find people, pages, and apps no matter where you are in your Confluence site:  

• Tap Home or the Confluence logo (  ) to return to your Confluence  dashboard. Tap Recent to see a list of pages and blog posts you’ve visited or worked on, plus drafts and starred content.
• Tap Spaces to move between your starred or recently visited spaces, or to access the space directory.
• Tap People to visit the people directory, where you can find information about the people you work with and create teams.
• Tap Apps to see a list of the apps that are installed on your site or visit an app’s dashboard.
• Tap Create to create a new page from anywhere on your site.

In addition, you can:

• Search for content in the search bar
• Tap the 9-dot icon (  ) to switch to another Atlassian app
• Tap the bell icon (  ) to see notifications for your Atlassian apps
• Tap (  ) to get help, see what’s new, view keyboard shortcuts, and more
• Tap your avatar to provide feedback, edit your profile, and change your settings
  
  

Navigating within a space

Use the space sidebar to navigate within a space. The space sidebar appears to the left of the page you’re viewing. It has three parts, each specific to the space you’re in.

The name of the space appears at the top of the space sidebar, followed by links to the space overview, blog, and space settings, plus dashboards for any apps you have installed.

Below these items, you’ll find your space shortcuts. These are links to important pages or websites that people who use the space need to be able to find easily. You can add shortcuts to pages in the space, in other spaces, or even on external websites.

Finally, there’s the content in the space. 
Pages are organized and displayed hierarchically in the page tree. To see the children of any page in the space, tap > next to the page name. Confluence automatically displays the children of the page you’re viewing.

Exploring your Home dashboard

Home makes it easy to explore your recent spaces and pages and stay updated on what’s happening in your organization. 
To the right of your dashboard, you’ll find site-wide announcements, calendars, and your site’s activity feed.

The activity feed is a treasure trove of recent and popular content across your site. These are pages and blog posts that other people in your company have liked or commented on. These updates can help you keep tabs on what’s going on across your company and gauge how your company culture is doing.

Search

Wherever your travels take you in Confluence , you should be able to find what you need. 
Use the search bar in the upper right  to look for pages, blog posts, spaces, and even people. Results will begin to show up as soon as you start typing.
If you get to many results you can filter them by space, contributors, content type, and more.

1. Search filters – refine your results by space, contributor, type, date, label, or space category.
2. Advanced search – go the the advanced search page.
3. Search tips – get search help, and tips for refining your search.

Search for exact matches

To find a page that contains an exact phrase, use double quotes around your search phase. 

For example, searching for "product manager" in double quotes will show search results with that exact match. Results will not contain pages that have only 'product' or only 'manager.'

Search with operators

If you don't know the exact phrase you're looking for, enter keywords and operators in the search field. The available operators are OR, AND, NOT, and Group.

• OR search: searching for 'marketing' OR 'digital' will show results that contain one of these terms.
• AND search: searching for 'marketing' AND 'digital' will show results that contain both of these terms.
• NOT search: searching for 'marketing' NOT 'digital' will show results that only contain 'marketing' and do not contain 'digital.'
• Group search: searching for (marketing OR digital) AND content will show results that can contain either 'marketing' or 'digital,' but must contain 'content.'

Search with wildcards

A wildcard is a character like ? or * that can be used to replace characters in your search. To replace a single character, use ?. To replace multiple characters, use *.

• For example, a search of b?g will show pages that have any of the following words: big, bug, bag, beg, or bog.
• A search of manag* will show pages that have words such as: manage, manager, management, managing, managerial, etc.
  
  

More detailed information regarding the search option can be found on the following Atlassian page: Search

Keyboard shortcuts

Within Confluence, you can access the complete list of keyboard shortcuts. There are three ways to access this list:

• Use the keyboard command: When viewing a page, press shift and ? together?
  

• Use the main navigation bar: At the top right of your screen, select the ? icon, then Keyboard shortcuts

• Scroll to the bottom of any page: In edit mode, scroll to the bottom and select the ? icon 

Confluence Editor

The Confluence editor is what you'll use to create and edit Confluence pages, blog posts, and comments. You can enter content as you would in a Word document, apply formatting, and embed other content and files on the page.

Note: To edit a page, you need the 'Add Pages' permission for the space. 

Blog post with instructions from Atlassian: The Editor

Macro's 

Macros are how you supercharge your Confluence pages. 

You can use macros to:

• change the format and layout of your page
• display media like video, audio, and social media content
• collate and organise Confluence pages, blogs, and files
• perform actions from a page, such as creating a page from a template. 

Take your Confluence space to the next level using macros. 

Below you find some useful macro's for Page editing.

Macro basics

Add a macro to your page

To add a macro to your page:

1. From the editor toolbar, select Insert , then Other Macros.

2. Select a macro from the list.
3. Enter any required parameters.
4. Choose Insert.

In the editor you'll see a placeholder that represents the macro. Once you publish your page, you'll see the macro in its full glory. 

Edit a macro

Macro parameters are used to change the behavior of a macro.

To change the macro parameters:

1. In the editor, click the macro placeholder and select Edit.
   
2. Update the parameters as required then select Insert.

Head to the documentation for specific macros of Atlassian to view full details of the parameters available in each macro.
Some Macros have been highlighted below:

Macro highlighted

Table of Contents and Content Zone Macro

The Table of Contents macro scans the headings on the current Confluence page to create a table of contents based on those headings or selected zone.
This helps readers find their way around lengthy pages, by summarizing the content structure and providing links to headings. 

Step-by-step guide Add Table of Contents:

1. From the editor toolbar, choose Insert  > Other Macros.
2. Choose Table of Contents from the Confluence content category.
3. Use the parameters below to specify which pages to display.
4. Choose Insert.

You can then publish your page to see the macro in action. 

More detailed information regarding Table of contents can be found on the following links:

• Table of Contents Macro
• Table of Content Zone Macro

Children Display Macro

Add the Children Display macro to a page to display a list of pages from a specific part of the page hierarchy.  You can choose to display pages that are a child of the current page, or a child of any other page in a space. 

This macro is great for providing quick access to:

• pages related to a project 
• procedures and how-to pages.

Because it relies on the page hierarchy, the list of pages is automatically updated when pages are added, deleted, or moved.  You can even show an excerpt from the page for extra context. 

Step-by-step guide: Add the Children Display macro to your page

To add the Children Display macro to a page:

1. From the editor toolbar, choose Insert  > Other Macros.

2. Choose Children Display from the Confluence content or Navigation category.
3. Use the parameters below to specify which pages to display, and how you want them to look. 
4. Choose Insert. 

You can then publish your page to see the macro in action. 

More detailed information regarding Table of Children's Display can be found on the following link:  Children Display Macro

Code Block Macro

The Code Block macro is an essential tool for presenting technical content clearly and consistently.
It allows you to display code, configuration snippets, or command-line examples in a way that preserves formatting, improves readability, and prevents accidental formatting changes by Confluence’s rich-text editor.

It will also prevent you from not being able to save a page if a code block is not used for saving code on a page or a page breakage.

Add a Code Block macro to your page to display code examples with syntax highlighting. 

This is great for sharing code snippets such as:

• sample code
• terminal commands
• excerpts from application logs.

Add the Code Block macro to your page

To add the Code Block macro to a page:

1. From the editor toolbar, choose Insert  > Other Macros.

2. Choose Code Block from the Formatting category.
3. Choose a language for syntax highlighting.
4. Use the parameters below to customise how the code block should appear on your page. 
5. Choose Insert. 
6. Type or paste your code into the macro placeholder. 

You can then publish your page to see the macro in action. 

More information can be found on the following Atlassian page; Code Block Macro

Apps

Draw IO

Draw.io addon for Confluence is used to create powerful, easy to use and secure diagrams and whiteboards.

You can use draw.io to visualize everything:

• Process Modeling and Relationships (BPMN 2.0, ERD, Flowcharts, Swimlane diagrams…)
• Software Development and Networks (UML, UML 2.5, AWS, Azure, Cisco, GCP, IBM…)
• Administration (Org charts, Mindmaps, Floorplans, Infographics)
• AI-driven Smart Templates for all of the use cases mentioned above
• Meetings and Brainstormings (with our simplified whiteboard editor)
• And many more

Instructions: https://drawio-app.com/blog/getting-started-with-draw-io-for-confluence/ 

Draw.io addon additional information: Draw.io Tutorial