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December 14, 2020
#How To#Confluence
1 min
Hey All!
We are excited to share our expertise and many years’ experience with Confluence Cloud macros. We collected our knowledge and useful hints on which macro and under what circumstances to use in Confluence Cloud featuring:
Children Display
Content by Label
Page Properties
Page Properties Report
Trello board
Task Report
Table of Contents
Decision Report
and many more!
What are you waiting for? Grab your copy of our guide by clicking the button below and let us know what other macros to include.
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Two-Minute How-To: Filtering Tables in Confluence Cloud
December 8, 2020
#How To#Confluence
6 min
What is the major advantage of storing data in structured tables? We believe that the answer is the ability to find the relevant information in seconds, be comfortable with your data, and gain insights exactly when you need it. No matter what kind of tables you have and what size they are, you can filter them in Confluence Cloud in the blink of an eye.
In this post, you’ll learn how to filter table data, search for values within the whole table, and hide unnecessary columns.
To get started, you need to enable filtration for tables on a Confluence page by adding the Table Filter macro in the page view mode.
1. How to filter table data
To filter table data, hover over table columns, click the funnel icon in a table header, type or select values, and voila, you filtered the table. Two figures in the upper right corner of the table indicate the number of filtered rows in relation to the total number of entries.
If you’d like to stick to the results of your filtration, you can save these changes.
In case you don’t know exactly in what column to look for values, you can try the global filter that allows filtering the whole table at once. Use the regular expressions for the advanced search, for instance, when you need the partial word search or search for multiple items.
3. How to hide columns
If your table is large and has a lot of columns, you can hide unnecessary ones to make it readable and easier to navigate.
Learn more about Confluence Cloud
Read our guide to get started with Confluence Cloud macros and learn how you can use them to create engaging content.
This is our second post in the series of Two-Minute How-to blog posts. You can also check how to create polls in Confluence Cloud.
If you have any questions or would like to suggest a topic for the next post, feel free to contact us. Check out the latest news in the How-to category in our blog! 😉
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There are plenty of solutions for managing tasks and to-dos for teams to be more organized and efficient while sharing work and collaborating on the same projects. If you are looking to start using such a tool at your workplace or are already using one, but would like to try something new, this post will give you an overview of five options to consider.
A perfect task management tool has the right set of features, a nice and user-friendly interface, it is fast and easy to use. It should be flexible, but not overwhelming or confusing with loads of advanced functionality that your team doesn’t need.
Let’s take a look at a brief overview, major features, and pricing of:
Use the highlights below to compare these utilities and see if one of them matches your needs.
Trello
Trello is a free tool that helps teams stay on the same page synchronizing multiple tasks. You can create personal and team boards to track your tasks. If you are not sure what to start with, you can customize templates and use them to boost your productivity at home and at work.
You can easily organize and plan your activities, be it a new team project or your family vacation. Create a board and populate it with lists to visualize your work adding cards to each list. Trello cards are easy to use: you can add checklists, tags, comments, files, due dates. You can rapidly drag and drop items between lists to show progress to your teammates.
Pricing: Trello is free to use. If you are planning to use it for free with your team, you can create only 10 boards. The unlimited amount of boards and more capabilities are available in the Business Class version for $9.99 per user per month. You can be billed monthly or annually. Learn more.
Confluence Cloud
Confluence is a collaboration software that helps teams keep all their work in one place organizing it with the help of pages and spaces. Teams can swiftly share content and discuss their projects. The great thing is that either you need to manage product requirements or you want to collaborate on marketing plans, you can use different templates that can save you a lot of time.
In Confluence, you can create task lists mentioning your colleagues who can also edit the tasks adding statuses and due dates.
Moreover, you can edit tasks in real time together with your coworkers avoiding mess in your documentation.
Pricing: Confluence is always free for teams with less than 10 users. You can get the Standard plan for $5 per user per month choosing annual or monthly billing. Learn more
Asana
Asana is a web and mobile application that allows you to manage tasks online without using email. You can create an organization or a workspace that will include members (your company employees) and guests (customers, partners, etc.). Employees are grouped in teams and you can organize their work in projects with tasks displayed as a to-do list that can be sorted and filtered based on user’s goals. A task list can have sections to arrange tasks based on their priority, different work stages, categories, etc. What’s nice is that the list of tasks is not overloaded with details. But they are one click away – select a list item and view its details on the sidebar that can be collapsed to get a better view of a task list.
Working with tasks is easy and intuitive, while powerful. You can assign a task to delegate it to someone, set a due date and time, create sub-tasks, post a comment, attach files, follow the task, mark the task complete or incomplete, and more.
Besides seeing a list of tasks from the project perspective, you can view the list of all tasks assigned to you or some other person across all projects. Another cool feature is personal and team calendars, which show tasks assigned to you (personal calendar) and tasks of your team across all projects in a single view.
You also get:
Inbox page, where the updates on all projects you’re a member of and tasks that you follow or are assigned to are shown
Dashboard with your projects’ progress charts
Basic and advanced tasks search capabilities
Reminders about tasks
Private projects, tasks, and teams
Creating tasks and conversations by sending emails to Asana
Team conversations, where team members post announcements and discuss work
Email notification as an alternative to using Asana Inbox.
Pricing: Accounts in Asana are free and tied to individual users. For teams up to 15 people, there is a free plan with basic features. For larger teams or to use premium benefits, you need to upgrade either the entire organization or one team. The cost of the premium option depends on the size of your plan. You can get Asana Premium for $10.99 or less per user per month. You can be billed monthly or annually. Learn more
Hubstaff Tasks
Hubstaff Tasks is a web-based project management tool that simplifies team collaboration. Its intuitive interface makes it easy to jump into for teams of different sizes.
Hubstaff Tasks keeps all of your tasks organized in a Kanban board using cards and columns. The app will show you a quick overview of all the tasks that are currently being worked on, which project phases they are in, as well as who’s working on them. You can create a card for each task or to-do and move it to different stages of the project by dragging and dropping. Here’s what you can do with your task cards:
Assign team members and include followers
Add task descriptions, attach files, and create task labels
Set due dates and hourly estimates
Communicate with and notify teammates using comments
The app has an Agile Sprints feature that shows you all the tasks assigned to you. You can organize them by current or future sprint, allowing you to prioritize the right tasks and keep the workflow moving forward.
Hubstaff Tasks’s custom workflows feature lets you advance tasks to the next stage and assign them to the right team members with just one click. It also has automated Stand-ups that team members can use to report accomplishments and roadblocks. With these features, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and that things are getting done.
Pricing: Hubstaff Tasks has a free plan for up to 5 users. Its Premium plan offers unlimited projects and 5 GB of storage for $5/user/month. Learn more
Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk (RTM) is a cross-platform web-based application that you can use to manage tasks from a computer or smartphone online or offline. This tool is a popular task manager for personal use, but you can perfectly customize and use it for business purposes.
If your team’s work is organized into projects, you can create separate lists for each project. You can create subtasks (this feature is available for Pro accounts).
You can assign tasks and share/send to-dos to other RTM users. Tasks can be prioritized, postponed, moved to another list. You can perform actions on several tasks at once and set reminders. It also supports recurrent tasks, comes with flexible search, several sorting options, and the ability to add tasks via email. It is even possible to add a location to a task.
You can track tasks that are due today and tomorrow or are overdue. It is easy to get a printable weekly planner.
Remember the Milk has the Pro Tester Program, which you can join to get access to pre-release versions of new cool features. So if you are missing something in the released version, check out this program and see if what you are looking for is available there.
Pricing: Standard Remember the Milk accounts are free. Pro accounts are $39.99 per year and give you access to additional features. Learn more
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In the previous post How Project Managers and Scrum Masters Use Confluence for Project Monitoring, we showed how management professionals use Confluence to build a dashboard based on data from Jira and Bitbucket for project monitoring. In the present article, we move on to the second part of the dashboard. It contains reports showing what went well during the sprint and what needs to be worked on. The dashboard provides you with the visualized data for analysis during the sprint retrospective when the team can inspect itself and plan the improvements to be enacted in the following sprints.
Analyze what’s been done: Pull Request Activities charts
The Pull Request Activities chart shows the number of pull requests by state and comes in two variants: pull requests grouped by a repository or by a user.
By looking at these charts, you can identify if there were any problems in teams working in the same repos, see how much each person managed to do, and use these insights in future sprint planning. For example, if you see there were a lot of declined pull requests during the sprint, there could be some problems in the teams’ arrangements, so this is a perfect occasion to discuss and resolve them.
The Pull Request Activities chart shows the number of open, merged, and declined pull requests in a particular repository. Grouped like this, the Pull Request Activities chart shows the number of pull requests made by a particular user around the whole project.
One more point to consider is the number of open pull requests at the end of the sprint — you need to count them in if you want to predict whether you’ll be able to complete work on time in the next sprint.
Learn, plan and improve: Pull Requests Gantt chart
The following chart can give your team an understanding of how long the pull requests take to resolve. It can help you predict using historical Git data if your team can finish the tasks by the end of the sprint.
The Pull Requests Gantt chart helps you see the tendencies in pull request resolution time for each user.
To make realistic predictions, you need to look at the average age of PRs created by the author. If a developer is junior or new to a particular repository or project, they tend to make more mistakes, or they are subjected to more thorough reviews and testing, which potentially delays their PRs, which you need to consider in your planning. Your ideal models will be the users with sets of “colorful bricks” of almost the same size, as they will probably tend to follow the accepted practice.
One more thing that you can pay attention to is the case when a pull request or a few are closed by the very end of the sprint. It could be a sign that the author was hurrying to meet the deadline, which might be the result of review delays or just carelessness, so keep that in mind.
Activity Graph is made to help you know what everybody was doing during the sprint in terms of commits, pull requests, Jira issues, and meetings.
The Activity graph helps you visually compare the distribution of the workload.
The idea behind it is that predictions based on engineering metrics are great, but even a few calls or meetings can slow down the processes. In research by Harvard Business Review, 65% of senior managers said that meetings keep their teams from completing their work. That’s why you need to look at who does what, identify bottlenecks, and manage the processes so that there are no obstacles nor reasons for delays. You can determine who is spreading themselves too thin and find those who are not actively involved. It’s evident that if you expect active development from your engineers and they are stuck in a series of meetings, it won’t work.
Using these metrics, you can understand why the team is moving with such speed and how the changes in the processes affect the team dynamics.
And the last, but not the least thing when we look back on the finished iteration, is calculating velocity.
The Velocity graph shows the ratio of story points committed vs. story points completed during the sprint.
When we plan a new sprint, we should consider the information about story points performance in the previous sprints. This way, we can observe the trends, make some conclusions, and change the planning approach if needed. For example, we can calculate the average number of story points completed within one sprint (velocity) and stick to this value in the following sprints. And after that, as more data about finished sprints is accumulated, you can plan much more accurately.
In the Project Management Dashboards in Confluence webinar, we talked about the tools that project managers and scrum masters use, and that help them make data-driven decisions based on the data from Jira and Bitbucket. We showed how you could enhance Confluence’s default functionality to create easy-to-understand reports for management and stakeholders with all the technical and business metrics visualized on Confluence pages.
Here we bring this information back together and provide you with the guides on how to build a dashboard where you can ensure that projects remain on track and see the actual progress compared to the project objectives stated in the plans.
Visualize the backlog: open vs resolved issues graph
As new tasks, features, and bugs are added continuously during the project implementation, the visualization of the dynamics in the project backlog helps spot the bottlenecks in the processes timely. Using it, you’ll be able to find inefficiencies and support the teams, whose backlogs contain more work to do than they could possibly perform.
The Created vs Resolved Issues report shows the difference between the number of created and resolved issues over a given period and whether the overall backlog is moving towards resolution.
Open vs Resolved Issues graph
This chart is built using the Jira Issues macro, which pulls the data from Jira according to a JQL or a link to a filter.
Gantt chart is a tool that visualizes the development process, helps to schedule your work and track the progress. In a nutshell, it is a timeline that’s used to illustrate how the project will run. You can see:
what tasks are included in a project or a sprint
start and end dates of a project or a sprint
tasks duration — project schedule, i.e., start and end dates
who works on a particular task.
Gantt chart
Using this chart, you can visualize all the tasks and phases of the project to optimize task planning and distribution, so you can predict when you will deliver the product. By visualizing the dependencies and parallel processes, you’ll also be able to find critical points, such as when the tasks depending on each other are planned at the same time slot.
A burndown chart is often used in Agile project management to visualize the amount of work completed during the sprint compared to the total work, so a team can keep track of the time remaining to complete that work.
Burndown chart
Based on the data exported from Jira, this chart displays the total amount of work in story points that a team should complete during the sprint. An orange line is the amount of work left. A purple line displays how the sprint should run in the ideal world where the efforts are distributed equally.
The tasks burn down as they are marked as completed and on the last day of a sprint, no significant tasks should remain. If you see that your teams tend to fail to complete the tasks in time, you need to investigate the reasons for this issue and reduce the workload.
Make the development process transparent: engineering metrics
While monitoring the progress of the project, it’s necessary to see the actual change over time. Here we offer you the chart that will show the dynamics of contributions in terms of commits made by users over the chosen period. You can build a similar chart showing the pull requests dynamics and other charts based on the data from Bitbucket by feeding in the corresponding CSV file, which you can get via the Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket’s Export to CSV feature.
Using these, you’ll be able to see the trends in pull requests and commits and find out if your team is committing more code now than before.
Commits Dynamics chart
During the daily meetings, teams try to spot the difficulties that appear in the processes, and these charts can bring more transparency to them. For example, if you keep your tasks between a day or two and see that one of the developers hasn’t committed in a few days, maybe it’s time to talk and find out what difficulties they might have.
The graphs and charts described in this article will help you gain more visibility into the current state of the processes and make project monitoring easier. Using the Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket app as a data provider, and the Table Filter and Charts for Confluence app to aggregate and visualize the data from Bitbucket and Jira, you will get the functionality comparable to BI platforms in Confluence.
In the next article in the series, we’ll tell you how to build the dashboard, which can be used by any agile team for a sprint retrospective.
Watch the webinar’s recording on our YouTube channel while waiting for our next post and tell us what you think in the comment section.
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You can easily filter and aggregate information on Confluence pages. Moreover, you can create your set of statuses and change them in the page view mode on the fly.
Discover our comprehensive list of apps to boost your project planning capabilities here!
If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post below. Don’t forget to subscribe to email notifications about new articles in our blog.
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