How to Make Charts and Graphs in Confluence
Visualizing data can drastically improve the cognition of your information by the target audience. If you use Confluence for data storage and processing, graphs and diagrams will become real helpers in this.Whether you’re managing a project timeline, analyzing sales figures, or monitoring team performance, integrating charts and graphs into your Confluence pages can transform static reports into dynamic, interactive dashboards.
Many in-built and third-party tools allow you to build diagrams, charts, and graphs in Confluence. In this article, you’ll find more information on different apps for building charts and graphs. You’ll learn how to use the native Confluence Chart macro and see one of the apps in action.
Top five apps for charts and diagrams
The Atlassian Marketplace suggests a wide range of apps in the Charts & Diagramming category. You can find a suitable tool depending on your needs and budget. See top five charts and diagrams apps in this category and their specifications in the table below:
|
App |
Confluence Cloud/Data Center |
Features | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draw.io Diagrams for Confluence |  / |
Allows you to create whiteboards and diagrams, ensuring visual data structurization | |
| Gliffy Diagrams for Confluence | / |
Offers a variety of diagrams and flowcharts for easy visualization of complex structures | |
| Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence | / |
Enables table data visualization, turning your Confluence tables into a wide range of charts and graphs of your choice | |
| PlantUML Diagrams for Confluence | / |
Generates images from various sources, including your GitHub integration | |
As you can see, these solutions differ to suit various needs. In this blog post, we will tell you more about apps and features for transformation of table data into charts. In this blog post, we’ll tell you more about the Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence app and the free inbuilt Confluence Chart macro.
Confluence’s native Chart Macro
It 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 an Area chart as follows:
Or render a 3D Bar chart:
Or see the ratio between different entities with a Pie chart, like the following one:
Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets
Graphs are a part of the functionality that the Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets app offers. The app is a pretty useful and flexible solution that includes several macros for various purposes. These are three of its most popular features:
- Table Filter helps you filter complex and large tables on the fly right when viewing or editing a Confluence page.
- Pivot Table allows you to create a pivot table with aggregated and summarized values from big and complex tables.
- Chart from Table can draw graphs using data from the tables (macro-generated tables also supported).
- Table Spreadsheet allows you to utilize the benefits of Excel-like spreadsheets right on your Confluence pages.
Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets is available for Cloud and Data Center Confluence versions, so you can use all of the macros regardless of your hosting type.
As for the Chart from table Macro, you can use it to create the following chart types:
- Gantt chart
- Pie and Donut chart
- Bubble Pie chart
- Column, Stacked Column, Bar, Stacked Bar chart
- Line, Area, Stacked Area chart
- Time Line, Time Area, Stacked Time – Area chart
- Radar (Spider) chart
- Contiguity / Barcode chart
- Scatter plot
- Punchcard
Graph samples with Chart from Table
You can build charts instantly in the view mode from a regular or macro generated table.
For example, let’s create pie charts with the monthly sales analysis, as follows:
Or create a stacked column chart to see the overall picture against multiple indicators, like this:
You can also use a multi-column chart to see the progress and trend over some time period, as follows:
Or build a Gantt chart to track the workflow of a project:
You can instantly modify the chart settings while viewing the page by using the settings panel on the side. If you need to change the source table, the chart will update automatically. After you finish setting up the chart, you can download it as a picture, or export it into a PDF or a Word file.
Combining the macros
Let’s see how you can use the other macros from the Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets bundle to up your charting game.
The Table Filter macro allows you to filter any table right in the page view or edit modes. The table will be immediately redrawn depending on the specified filter values. The rich set of filters helps you easily handle multi-format data turning large and complex tables into smaller, simpler ones.
With the Pivot Table macro, you can aggregate data from bigger tables with repeated values. Pivot tables help you simplify the information in a table before turning it into a chart.
You may combine all these three macros from the Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets app into a single data processing mechanism using the Table Toolbox macro (in Cloud). In such a way, you can even draw graphs from the filtered pivot table. And, of course, if you make some changes in filtration or graphs settings, the dashboard will be automatically updated according to your changes.
Alternatively, you can process your table data as a spreadsheet by wrapping a table into into the Spreadsheet from Table macro. It will transform the table into a spreadsheet which you can process similarly to Excel or Google Sheets further on. It also has various visualization capabilities, so if you prefer working with spreadsheets while analyzing data through charts and graphs, it can be done too.
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. If you use Confluence Server or Data Center, you need to set up an application link to your Jira instance. In Confluence Cloud, you can simply paste a URL to Jira into the page, and it will convert into the Jira Issues macro. Then you’ll be able to receive and handle your Jira data. You can visualize it with the Jira Chart macro (Jira filters and JQL queries are supported). Three types of charts are available:
- Pie Chart from Jira
- Created vs. Resolved Chart from Jira
- Jira Two Dimensional Chart
An example of a pie chart with the number of issues per assignee will look like this:
The comparison of created against resolved issues looks like this:
The sample two-dimensional chart looks like this:
Alternatively, you can process the incoming Jira data with the Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence app. With its help, you can build a chart from the table containing Jira issues or apply the Pivot Table macro and then create a chart from the calculated pivot table. You can also filter the issues if the list is too big. Of course, you can use the Jira macro filtration, but it is much more flexible and convenient to use the Table Filter macro. In this case, you can make changes on the fly, and graphs will be redrawn automatically. Combo!
Interested in trying our app?
You can see it in action on our demo server. And, of course, find out details in the documentation or watch the tutorials on YouTube to reveal all the capabilities of the Table Filter and Charts app. Also, check out a comparison table for the Chart and Chart from Table macros which can help you select a suitable macro for your needs.
