How to get an actual, simple, proper red? The one you refer to as "red" is actually an orange. Thank you.

Go ahead and do this one already. I am new to the platform and scoffed at how few cell highlighting options there were. Scoffed again when I saw how long you've been tracking the issue. You can do it!

I would go a step further and request the ability to create custom palette's of colors to use in backgrounds and cell colors. 

John Price added a comment - 1 hour ago

So I just looked and I'm now seeing 21 colors in my instance. See this update: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-October-2019-Edition/ba-p/1199197. They are a better palette as well.

Atlassian - should this ticket be closed?

The update you're referring to doesn't address table cell fill / highlight colours. The suggested colour palette should be configurable per instance, so that in the future, themes could be designed / implemented for a wiki instance as well and normal colour selections from the palette would also automatically update. And, not to speak for all people here, but I believe that we should be able to fully override the suggested palette and supply RGB values to the colour picker.

I wouldn't call this closed by a long shot.

So I just looked and I'm now seeing 21 colors in my instance.  See this update:  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-October-2019-Edition/ba-p/1199197.  They are a better palette as well.

Atlassian - should this ticket be closed?

I also saw the blurb about the new Premium Cloud service.  Will that just cost us more for Atlassian to ignore our requests?

Despite no movement on a number of important items across all products, Atlassian has announced their yearly price increase to better support us.

omg finally I was able to login and to unsubscribe from that email notifications. Since 2012 and you finally add 2 more colors.. speachless.

you need to seriously think about this instead of just implementing? The picker is already there. Just throw in a handful more colors and 80% of the people are set.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for participating in this issue, either by voting, commenting or just watching. We highly value your feedback in all forms, and through suggestions in jira.atlassian.com is not different. We use this channel often to learn the best we can with how customers use Confluence and how we can continue to improve the experience for as many users as possible.

We understand that resolving this problem is important for you. We have added two additional colors - purple and teal - to the new editor, but can't commit at this point when more colors will get to our roadmap.

We will keep monitoring usage and feedback on this issue to revisit it in the future and provide you with the next update when our plans change.

Thanks,

Hilary Dubin
Product Manager, Confluence

Especially white would be great in order to display tables with a "neutral" background of cells within a coloured panel.

This request is over six years old! It may seem low-priority, but in addition to the severity, the age of a bug or feature request should be taken into account as well, because frustration grows over time. I'm a brand-new user, and I need this feature. I can't imagine how frustrated I'd be if I'd been waiting for years for it with no movement. Please consider adding more colors. Thank you.

Please supports the full spectrum of HTML color codes like most web applications do. This is very essential feature.

Why on earth would someone even make the function in the first place with 5 colors (2-3 of which are so light that I can't see them, and the other 2 look pretty much the same to me... and I'm not color blind)? They could have at least standardized on the colors available for fonts, which has 40 colors. Horrible.

we just upgraded from confluence v5 to v6 and the colour scheme has gone all pastel-ish... and as a consequence we have quite a few users, who are "colour-blind", complaining they can't clearly see the different colours in tables etc.

Atlassian, you really need to get your **** together and do more for accessibility such as high contrast colour schemes and per person theme overrides.

Considering the server version of this ticket was promised a response or plan for solution in Nov 2017 with nothing of the sort actually happening nearly a year later, it really feels like the Atlassian developers are too busy refactoring the UI in marginally useful ways to address the basic utility and functionality that almost everyone uses day to day.  Can we get a little more focus on blueprints, templates, and the major macros (like colors) that support them instead of a constantly changing side-navigation?  

Please add more colour to the table background palette. It is highly frustrating only having 5 colours available. 

The actual palette is not inclusive, we have colorblind users that can not distinguish the colors used in the palette and this is leading to misinterpretation of the tables and their meaning.

It's even in consideration for future development on Confluence Server, please don't let this easy chance for some bonus sympathy from the Atlassian crowd go to waste.

Atlassian PLEASE revisit this. Like everyone else has said, this should be such a simple addition.

This has been a problem since at least 2012. Atlassian appears to have no interest in fixing it, which is a shame, because it should be incredibly simple to add a few more Hex colors.

I understand but there is any other way? any add-on is available for this cell color option ?

bet what?   Atlassian will not respond. 

To get out of the pastel colors, I'm using a CSS entry (actually a relative long list) to turn them into more intensive colours.

The pastel colors also don't make it to the wall in case of overhead projection ("beamer").

This changes the colors in the pages, in the editor mode, and in PDF/Word export.

Only the colors in the selection button cannot be changed by CSS:  they are hard coded.  Can you believe this????

The colors are too hard to distinguish for cell options. Please provide more options with more contrast. I am colorblind so this is especially a challenge for me to see the color differences.

This is a relative simple feature, to set the background of any item is standard in all tool-sets today, is there a reason why this has not been touched since 2012 even when it is a high demand for it? Please let the community know as we are completely in the dark on a feature that would help a lot of people!

A simple background color picker like the one for text color would be sufficient for the first step (they should use the same real color picker in the end). It would be ok to change the highlight color picker in the table settings to do this and move this functionality to override the background color on the text element it self, this feature should be used to be able to highlight text for certain reasons (the regular marker pen colors are fine here).

To be clear: pseudo code:

<table-cell color=mybackcolor><text highlightcolor=myhighlightcolor>Highlighted text</text> More text</table-cell>

This would have a table cell with a custom background color and the the text where a certain part of the text is highlighted.

"CONF-27618 = More cell highlight colors in Confluence"  - surely the issue is about adding more choice of cell colours as a part of the native Confluence interface.  I had a look at the use of Macros to get more colour choice and decided it was too complicated for most users of the system in its "vanilla" form.

There are currently active JIRA macros which let the user choose any color they would like using a Hex code, e.g. Panel macro > Border Colour. Implement the same thing for cells and add an opacity meter.

Same issue.  Many people have voiced their various reasons in this and other threads for a better seleciton of colors or a color picker. So not to beat the dead horse I'll simply agree and ask for more colors please.

I am amazed at the fact this hasn't been fixed. I too would like it. The provided colors conflict with the change highlighting when comparing pages or getting a change email notification. See https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-45738 .

I am wondering if there is some javascript that could be added to a page to modify the colors to map to new colors. Maybe it can be done with CSS. I'm not sure.

Up !

Any news ?

Over 6 months since status was updated to "Needs Verification"?  Originally posted in 2012?  This looks an awful lot like a company that has dropped the ball on something that is near trivial to fix and has high value to users.  Atlassian, please address.

Wow, I just stumbled on this one while trying to change the cell color...very lame that you can't specify the color.  Why so long to respond to this feature?

Adding another voice to the crowd asking for this...

yes, this feature would be really really useful, waiting for it for many years.

Frankly, a choice between grey, and 4 pale colours is ridiculous. There are innumerable use cases that would demand more colours. This is a design short-sightedness that sticks out like a sore thumb amidst Atlassian's typical streamlined user experience. Please fix it!

Come on, Atlassian, this can't be hard to implement.
You would satisfy >125 votes

When I have a look at the XHTML storage format, it's a matter of adding some color definitions in CSS and in the GUI color picker.

<td class="highlight-blue" data-highlight-colour="blue">cell text</td>

I do not think the assigned reporter, Luis Junior, works for Atlassian anymore. According to his profile, his last known activity was in June 2013. Several Atlassians have made modifications to this issue since it was opened - that includes downgrading the issue to a suggestion - so they are somewhat aware the issue exists. However, they are not prioritizing this issue for some reason.

I believe Atlassian should have a team that focuses on adding to its existing products functionality that are standards in other products. In some areas Atlassian is falling behind for not addressing this type of request. They shouldn't be only about getting new clients but also maintaining a healthy Atlassian user community. I think we as consumers should continue raising our voices. Unfortunately, I do not know if the assignee is getting individual emails when a new comment is added to the ticket.

How about giving this project to an intern?

I agree with Chris here. This is such a basic functionality and many Open Source editors give this. Not sure what is stopping Atlassian from implementing this functionality.

Having only just started on Confluence, I had to check with our applications team that we had the most recent version as some of the missing features were no-brainers. What if a firm mandates the use of a style guide? How can I apply the custom colours required to Confluence content without hacks?

The lack of basic functionality (this request being one of many), steering customers towards macros and markup hacks (difficult to administer and shoddy user experience), the complete disregard for product support (an update on this page would be great) and the underhanded approach to add-ons (i.e. leave it to other developers to implement a half-baked solution and charge like a wounded bull) make it very difficult to like Confluence. I'm really starting to wish I had access to SharePoint again

Luiz Junior has been assigned as a Reporter for this issue. Luiz, any chance of a written update from someone at Atlassian? As has been previously mentioned, simply closing an issue down is not a suitable response considering we are paying customers.

This seems like a low-hanging-fruit enhancement that Atlassian must have earmarked for Add-On developers.

I could add here my frustration about Confluence product management to give you "a simple explanation". This system is full of easy-to-to enhancements and bug fixes which are not being addressed, although they are desired by many people and requested for ages. This ticket is only one of these.

Returning user to Confluence (and other Atlassian products) after moving companies and now in progress of introducing new company to Confluence and a real disappointment to see that this has not been addressed or is even being looked at. If this is due to a technical reason being very difficult then a simple explanation would be much appreciated and likely understood by most users.

The workaround mentioned in a previous comment for using the source editor really isn't suitable for the majority of users.

Any chance someone from Atlassian could comment on this request? Leaving it open with no feedback regarding progress is not how to engage with paying customers in my opinion.

Apart from Color, you should get an option to have cell borders, the way you have in excel. The cells appear so light that you sometime tend to miss those soft lines that mark a table.

Note to users of ddonuts4's comment.

You may also consider that this "hack" will not influence the outcome of printing and exports (e.g. to word or pdf)

We should insist in Atlassian to work on this long-time enhancement request finally.
This ticket hasn't been even assigned to a bugmaster nor has it status ever been updated beyond "New".
Actually, the same request in CONF-27496 has been tagged "won't fix". What a flock of ignorance!

Note to users of ddonuts4's comment.

For background colors, many of the HTML color names do not work. You will need to enter them in decimal rgb form, or as #rrggbb hex form. If you enter them as #rrggbb, the Atlassian editor will convert them to decimal rgb form.

As a temporary fix, if you go into the source editor, remove the class="..." and data-highlight-color="...." attributes then type the following inside the <td> you want to color.

style="background-color: blue"
You can add pretty much whatever color you want here with a few quirks such as not being able to use hex notation. You can also change the font color by adding color:fontColor inside the style attribute
style="background-color: blue; color: white;"

Example:

<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td style="background-color: blue;color: white;">Blue with white font</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="background-color: rgb(255,150,150);color: black;">Lighter Red with black font</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="background-color: rgb(0,230,0);color: blue;">Green with blue font</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Steve, I believe you can left, center or right justify text in a cell just using the normal paragraph justification options (same row as bolding text, text color, etc.)

The column width feature is also a huge miss, as is the ability to justify items in a column. It's very hard to present numerical data that isn't justified right. However, I hope that's in another feature request.

As with other commenters, I am surprised more colors aren't available. This, the inability to set column widths and no implementation of captions for pictures are key features to produce technical documentation.

I continue to be amazed, as others are, with how long it is taking to implement this seemingly simple feature.

At minimum, it should support the 16 colors that Microsoft Excel supported over a decade ago. This isn't difficult functionality, and when you remove red and green as valid options (for accessibility issues for R/G colorblind users) the options are extremely limited. This really deserves a higher priority than it appears to have been given by Atlasssian.

We are using confluence 5.5.2 and the issue exists, could you please append the Affects version. Thanks

I agree with previous posts, there should be a color picker for table cell backgroud colors instead of the current 5 options. Our use case: we use color highlighting for road maps with colored time bars like attached screen shot.
We are an enterprise Confluence, Jira customer.

Because of the lack of color selection for table cells, I will have to delete a large table on the wiki page and re-create it in Excel, a huge waste of time. So, for me not being able to select basic colors that are clearly visible in a table breaks the table feature.

This bug should be escalated since it's not an "improvement", it's fixing the basic functionality of a table.

I support all previous posts on this issue.

Another use case: Look at the notification mails or the history of a page with a table that has green and blue as their background color: You are unable to tell what has been added or what has changed, because the add/change marks are in the same color as the table background. So in fact, you can remove blue and green from the usable colors, leaving you with three "colors" - if you consider gray as a color. Red is considered a signal color for things that went wrong, I wouldn't use it for simple highlighting. Therefore I am stuck with only two colors: Gray and yellow. Not much of choice left, and too less for my purposes.

The root use case was to mark entry fields (realized by table cells) for different people/project roles with different colors so that it is clear who has to fill in data to which fields. We do have more than two different field (cell) types, hence need more than two usable colors. Since changes are made over time in an incremental fashion, it is important for us to see the differences with each change.

I support all previous posts on this issue.