Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel Tricks: Turning Off Table Sorting

In the previous Confluence How To posts, we focused on the look of Confluence proper. And now we will show you what can be done with your content. Specifically, we are going to share a couple of tricks that can be useful for turning off table sorting in Confluence. By default, there’s no standard way to do that for certain tables which can be painful since some tables don’t make any sense once sorted.

Confluence provides the way to disable the Confluence Sortable Tables plugin though. However, this could be overkill, since sometimes sorting may come in handy.

One of the workarounds might be removing the standard header row and mimicking it with a highlighted first row with bold text in it.

However, if you need the standard header row for some reasons, you may want to insert an empty row right after it and merge all cells in this row. This will prevent the table from being sorted. In fact, if your table contains any merged cells, it can’t be sorted, here we added a dummy row for a nice table look and data consistency.

Another solution might be to add an empty column and merge all its cells with the column before  it. Your table will look like the original one and the number of rows won’t change, however, you should have time and patience for merging cells for each row, so this makes sense only for short tables.

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