Nesting tables are unsupported

Hi everyone, my name is Rory - I’m a Product Manager from the editor team. Thanks for your continued feedback on this ticket. I wanted to share a few updates on it’s status.

Firstly, I’m excited to confirm that the changes to table extensibility are now generally available.

What is table extensibility?

Table Extensibility allows elements, such as a data macro, to act as the source of another element. Confluence Cloud users can then create transformer macros – such as pivot tables – or build visual charts that reference the data in a source table. Additionally, users can chain multiple macros together to create a more complex relationship between multiple sets of data. This allows real-time viewing of the visualization as the data changes.

More details on this feature can be found here.

Secondly, it appears that a clarification is required to this ticket. Although the recent work on Table Extensibility will unlock new value for Confluence Cloud users, it will unfortunately not enable tables to be nested within one another in the new editor. We apologise if this was not made clear previously.

As of today, our position on nesting tables within tables has not changed from what has been previously communicated. However, with the continued momentum this feature request has within the community we plan to re-evaluate this position over the coming months and provide a further update as soon as we can. To reflect this update I will be moving this ticket back to the “Under Consideration” while it is reviewed.

My team and I would love to learn more about your use of nested tables, and more generally about your use of tables in the editor. If you are interested in speaking with us directly then please feel free to book time using the Calendly link below.

https://calendly.com/rb-atlassian/tables-research

Cheers,

Rory

Hello everyone!

Thank you for engaging on this ticket and sharing your use cases/need for nested tables. Our team is working on table extensibility - the ability to allow customers to create custom reports or charts from both native and/or 3rd party data sources chained together, in an easy, intuitive (WYSIWYG) way. We will share more on how you and app partners can get involved when we are ready for an Early Access program in mid-Q3 (Feb 2023).

As we're working through this feature and others, we wanted to address a lot of your concerns as to the future of the new editor and legacy editor.

Please read our recent community post here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/Change-to-your-content-is-in-your-hands/ba-p/1324476

Thanks,
Avinoam

To be clear on what’s been done, previously in Confluence Cloud, you could place tables inside lists, block quotes, and other tables, we call these “nested tables”. We disabled the ability to create new nested tables. Your existing pages with nested tables are safe and you can still modify these existing nested tables (edit cells, add/remove rows/columns, etc). You just won't be able to create new ones.

As to why we have made this change, there are several reasons:

• Less than 1% of pages have these nested tables showing there are other ways to get the message across.
• Nested tables are a huge source of complexity which results in a less reliable editor.
• Nested tables make pages harder to read, especially on mobile devices.

As part of our broader efforts to create a reliable, predictable, stable, and expressive editor, we have made this change.

Phil Oye, Senior product manager