How to Make Charts and Graphs in Confluence

Atlassian Confluence is a powerful Enterprise wiki solution that you can use to manage any type of content – articles, photos, documents. And, if you want your page look good – you should take some time and make it comfortable for reading. Researches show that visualization is a key point for the proper and quick perception of large data amounts, because:

• every human receives almost 90% of information through the eyes
• eyes have about 70% of sensory receptors
• visual information processing uses up to 50% of brain cells

That’s so usage of visualizations can improve cognition of your information by the target audience. So if you use Confluence for data storage and processing, graphs and diagrams will become real helpers in this.

Diagrams in Confluence

Unfortunately, Confluence does not provide out-of-the-box capabilities to create diagrams for now. But there are a lot of add-ons that add diagramming support in Confluence, for example:

• Confluence Diagramming by Creately
• Draw.io Diagrams for Confluence
• Lucidchart for Confluence
• Gliffy Diagrams for Confluence
• Graphviz Diagrams for Confluence

All these add-ons except Graphviz Diagrams include a large set of templates for drawing diagrams and allow you to quickly insert different types of pre-defined drawings. Graphviz Diagrams uses graph definition language and graphviz library (you should install it on your server to make the add-on operating). At the same time, users can have different requirements for the add-on. For instance, your security officers can deny Internet access from Confluence server and so on. The specifications of the add-ons are given in the table below.

Charts in Confluence

When you try to google “confluence charts“, you can see the following solutions on the first page:

• Chart Macro by Atlassian (already included in Confluence package)
• Table Filter and Charts by StiltSoft
• Lucidchart (nice and easy-to-use diagrams and flexible licensing makes it a good choice as a diagramming tool)

You need a table with data to build a chart. Table data can be also generated by some macros (for example, SQL for Confluence), copy-pasted from Excel, or created from scratch in Confluence. When you have a set of data in your tables, you can apply either Chart or Chart from Table macros to generate a visually-appealing chart.

Chart Macro

This is the native macro bundled within Confluence. It offers you the following capabilities:

• supports Pie Chart, Bar Chart, 3D Bar Chart, Time Series Chart, XY Line Chart, XY Area Chart, Area Charts, Gantt Chart
• has a large number of settings to adjust and customize your graphs
• requires edit mode to configure the macro settings
• covers all simple cases when you need to draw a graph

For example, you can create the Area chart, as follows:

… or render the 3D Bar chart:

… or see the ratio between different entities with the Pie chart, like the following one:

Table Filter and Charts

The add-on is being continuously developed and improved by StiltSoft, an Atlassian Expert and Atlassian Verified Vendor. Graphs are a part of the functionality that Table Filter and Charts add-on offers. The add-on is a pretty useful and flexible solution that include the three macros:

• Table Filter
• Pivot Table
• Chart from Table

With Table Filter macro you can filter complex and large tables on-the-fly right when viewing or editing a Confluence page. Pivot Table macro allows you to create a pivot table with aggregated and summarized values from big and complex tables with repeated values. And, finally, Chart from Table macro can draw graphs using data from the tables (macro-generated tables also supported). You can choose from the following graphs:

• Pie
• Donut
• 3D Donut
• Column
• Stacked Column
• Bar
• Stacked Bar
• Line
• Area
• TimeLine
• Time Area

Graph samples with Chart from Table

You can create pie charts to show the consumption correlation, as follows:

Fish Type	2011
Herring	9500
Salmon	2900
Tuna	1500

… create a stacked column chart to see the overall picture against multiple indicators, like this:

	2009	2010	2011
Revenue	12.4	31.8	41.1
Expense	43.6	41.8	31.1

… or create the multi-column chart to see the progress and trend over some period of time, as follows:

You can download the chart as a picture, or you can instantly modify the chart settings while viewing the page by using the management panel, which can be hidden, as well as the source table:

Table filtering capabilities

Table Filter macro allows you to filter any table right in the page view or edit modes (table will be immediately redrawn depending on the specified filter values). The rich set of filters allows you to easily handle a multi-format data table, as follows:

• Free text filter
• Dropdown filter
• Multiple column filtering
• Date range filter
• Numbers range filter

You can easily turn a large and complex table, like this:

… to the small and simple table, just by specifying the appropriate filters and values in them:

Also, filtering can be temporarily disabled if needed..

Pivot Table

This macro allows you to get a pivot table with aggregated data values based on some ‘heavy’ table with repeated values. You can apply different types of aggregation:

• Count – counts the number of values pertaining to one label in the source table.
• Max – determines the maximal value per each label.
• Min – determines the minimal value per each label.
• Average – calculates the average values per each label.
• Sum – calculates the sum of values per each label.

As a result, your table with large data amount, like this:

… in a magic way turns into a pivot table, as follows:

Combo!

You may combine all these three macros from Table Filter and Charts add-on into a single data processing mechanism. In such a way, you even can draw graphs from the filtered pivot table. And, of course, if you make some changes in filtration or graphs settings, graphs will be automatically updated according to your changes.

How to get and visualize data from Jira in Confluence?

Of course, Atlassian supplies you with the out-of-the-box Jira integration in Confluence. You need to set up an application link to your Jira instance, then you’ll be able to receive and handle your Jira data. You can visualize it with Jira Charts macro (Jira filters and JQL queries are supported). Three types of charts are available to you:

• Pie Chart from Jira
• Created vs Resolved Chart from Jira
• Jira Two-Dimensional Chart

An example of the pie chart with the number of issues by assignee will look like:

… the comparison of created against resolved issues looks like this:

The sample two-dimensional chart looks like:

Alternatively, you can process the incoming JIRA data with the Pivot Table macro and then create a chart from the calculated pivot table. Of course, you can use the JIRA macro filtration, but it is much more flexible and convenient to use Table Filter macro, in this case you can make a changes on-the-fly and graphs will be redrawn automatically. Combo!

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