how do you sort these columns? I do not see the referenced sort icons when i create a table in Confluence as referenced here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf57/working-with-tables-701434777.html

thanks for any help you can provide

Hi Everyone,
Thank you for your feedback and patience with this feature suggestion. We're pleased to announce that we've recently implemented this and this will be shipping in our upcoming Confluence 5.8 release (for Server customers) and will be rolling out gradually for our Cloud customers.

We've added new buttons in the editor table toolbar that will let you cut, copy and paste table columns.

Confluence 5.8 is expected to ship within the next couple of months (but we're all hoping a little sooner for you all). Cloud customers should expect this within the next month.

Cheers,
The Confluence Team

Is there any update on this request? It's really puzzling that the copy/cut/paste row was in the first version of the RTE...but, no one thought about the same need for columns?

This makes it difficult to use Confluence for managing tables.

Pasting/copying into a spreadsheet isn't a solution if your table is styled/coloured so the only workaround I know of is to select the entire table, create dummy columns wherever necessary, select the whole table again, paste, examine the contents to make sure you didn't mess up, then remove the dummy columns and carefully check again. This is cumbersome, confusing, extremely error prone and works only in a limited set of setups.

Please consider adding column copying/pasting as soon as possible.

4 years!? Why is this still not done?

This is a much needed feature - thanks.

It would be enough to be able to transpose a table (which would have its own merits besides suddenly being able to operate on table columns as a whole).
A workaround for tables with no macros is to paste the table to a spreadsheet.

I've been maintaining a number of pages in Confluence where a lack of column manipulation is a pain.

For example, I have tables I maintain in Confluence showing our different software environments (Dev, Test, Stage, Prod) listed as columns and all the different configuration parameters and servers associated with them shown as rows. There are a lot more rows than columns. It's very two-dimensional information and it makes sense to present it and maintain it as such. But without the ability to move columns around or copy-paste them, it is difficult to add new columns (to represent new environments, e.g. UAT) which contain 25+% of the rows having similar values to other columns, or to cleanup or restructure one's information when you realize there are better ways to organize it.

This is a definite need for us; we used lots of tables and having to reinput column data from one to another because I cannot cut/paste or copy/paste is significant time. If they are large, I copy/paste the entire table into excel, make my change, copy/paste from excel to Confluence, then reformat the Confluence table back to where I had originally had it.
Lots of steps to do something that I could easily do in other table RTEs.

Hey Craig Petchell, any updates on the prioritization of this issue?

Here are some more examples of web based column reordering:
http://mottie.github.io/tablesorter/beta-testing/example-widget-column-reorder.html
Google Drive Spreadsheets
Smartsheet
etc