It would be nice if we could just adjust the starting number for lists <ol>'s that are broken.

That is possible today by simply typing the number you want as the first item in the list continuation (e.g. just enter "4. " to start a list that begins at item 4). It's also possible to split an existing list by pressing return twice after an existing item in the list.

However, both of these approach create two disconnected lists. If you later add an item to the first list (so it now has a 4th item to continue the example above), the second lists starting number is not updated. It would be nice if the two lists could be linked.

What is not under consideration for the scope of this current project is to support nesting of more content types in lists.

This is typically the desire, especially if lists cannot be linked when broken. The common use case is a how-to document with multiple steps that may involve notes, tables, code blocks, etc. as part of a step. Allowing continuation of a list with dynamic numbering could alleviate the need for nested content, but nesting is the most natural approach.

It would be nice if we could just adjust the starting number for lists <ol>'s that are broken. I have numerous lists within callouts, and images, that are broken but are much too large to rebuild. Being able to simply set the starting number is not perfect, but it would allow us to fix our numbered lists without rebuilding them all. 

Still waiting a solution.... 

Hello All,

I'm not sure if this actually applies to resolving this 100%, but I've been able to successfully complete the 2 items bulleted above under the new Confluence writing.  Here's an example from one of my KB articles.

I tried to capture a few items (/warning element & /expand element) where I've started new ordered lists within the expand elements then "continue" with the ordered list below expand elements.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Looks like we're not able to paste screenshots into our comments or upload attachments to share.  Unless there's a approval process in place or I'm just dumb... so.. to ensure y'all have my example:

Confluence Ordered List Example

1. This is STILL not implemented? 
2. The last update is form Oct of 2022?
3. Seriously considering moving away from Confluence as a knowledge base platform.

Every time I start adding a note to a Confluence page, I give up because some basic features, like continuous numbered lists, don’t work. This is ridiculous. It’s better to write on a bread paper!

b44ee328bea8 did this progress past the dogfooding stage? The demos look promising! 

This is like 1990 functionality. Please get this fixed ASAP. Incredibly frustrating.

Will this be available in the legacy editor as well as the new?

The ability to break a numbered list between table rows would be extremely helpful.

Cell 1a:

1.
2.

Cell 2a:

3.
4.

Do you have a estimate timeline when this feature will be released ?

Also do you know if the planned update will fix the issue with the Import for Word document (.docx) where the numbering from the document does not import properly.

This looks great. Is this functionality going to allow for numbers with indented items?

i.e.

1.

  1.1

  1.2

2.

Hi defa27509ed3 , providing a quick progress update from my team to enable continuous numbering in the Editor. You can see a preview of the upcoming functionality to start an ordered list from any number, and not breaking the sequence of the list, in the videos below.

Screen Recording 2023-02-07 at 1.40.48 pm.mov

Screen Recording 2023-02-07 at 1.31.02 pm.mov

The team is currently dogfooding this functionality on our internal instances and performing quality assurance testing to ensure that what we release to production is of a high quality. This may take a few months to reach your instance, and we will share more details on this closer to the time of the actual rollout.

If you have any further questions or feedback to share on this topic, feel free to reach out to my team and I via email, or my Calendly link below:

•  Email: eyew@atlassian.com
•  Calendly: https://calendly.com/eyew/30min

Ethan Yew - Any update on his above? I see that it is now a few months old. 

Hi all, 

This is Ethan from the Atlassian Editor Team. As always, thank you for the continuous feedback on how we may improve the editing experience in Confluence, and the wider Atlassian product suite. I wanted to share that our team has been reviewing the feedback for this issue, and are keen to solve for ways of enabling authors to format lists to their liking, without breaking the numbering of an ordered list. 

We recognise this issue presents a significant challenge to create professional looking documentation, particularly when more complex sequencing of content is required. The current workaround of using shift + enter to create a newline to support the insertion of content without disrupting the numbering isn’t suitable for nodes which can’t currently be nested in lists at all (e.g. tables, panels, expands etc.).

From the feedback, we are focusing on addressing the following use cases:

1. Ability to start an ordered list from any number
2. Ability to continue the numbering in lists when split 

What is not under consideration for the scope of this current project is to support nesting of more content types in lists. Whilst there may be legitimate use cases to support for additional nesting (e.g. macros in lists), we recognise the core of the problem is primarily not wanting to break the sequence/count of a numbered list, especially with non-text content.

My team and I are exploring a few backwards compatible approaches at the moment that are aimed at not breaking existing content/storage formats, and aligned with interaction patterns you’ve come to expect from other notable rich-text editors. To ensure we’re on the right track, I invite you to schedule some time with my team and I to provide feedback on our approach and working assumptions using my 30 minute meeting link.

Thanks all and stay safe,

Ethan

Cannot continue numbering after inserting a table

1. One
2. Two

[ TABLE with content ]

1. Three
2. Four

Please add this feature considering that it's missing a lot of other features which is available in MS Word

+1

Awe, I definitely see your point here @TimDuke.  I was in geek mode thinking of the feature and not the fact one may be putting together an article that may be the equivalent of a 5 - 10 page report.  Having to sift through and find the correct <ol> and <li> on a bulleted outline for even a seasoned develop could make one go mad.

@MatthewLowrey - That would be an improvement and absolutely should be a feature, but it's still not enough.  I also think your assumption that anyone is capable of doing basic HTML is possibly overly optimistic.  With so many easy WYSIWYG products available, a lot of technical and non-technical writers don't need to tweak the code, much less translate it or create it from scratch, so there's little motivation to learn.  Then there is the time factor.  I know after I've spent hours creating detailed documents with numbered steps and careful image layouts, the last thing I want to do is translate it into something else and fight with the layout all over again.  

If they want to keep up with the competition, they need to provide a user experience that's more in line with 2022, instead of 2000.

Maybe it would just be easier to add in the ability to switch to straight HTML code?  I've seen some documentation services that have all these nifty UI stuff to make it look like some flavor of MS Word with an <HTML> button that switches what you have to view it as raw HTML.  I think by now anyone in the digital community is capable of doing basic HTML, or at a minimum Google around to find some editor like Fiddle to grab the HTML code from that.

After seeing the comment @Martin Sanchez posted.  This issue has not been a priority, or maybe doable.  So, maybe it's time to provide some alternative that can be more of a blanket option to fix any and all of these limited types.  Just a thought.  

Really banged my head against the wall trying to over come this...

It continues to be mildly embarrassing to push for confluence as our documentation tool, primarily because of the lack of numbered list capability, or the limitations to when its possible/not possible to control the numbered list sensibly. Sure we have a dozen half-suitable workarounds, but you're talking about forcing the people who want to be advocates for confluence with having to spend half their introduction to confluence explaining how to convert an SOP document that has a numbered list and images into a confluence document via workarounds.   It is so bizarrely out of place for a tool otherwise so powerful. 

It's not even just the feature, it's the dissonance and UX penalty of learning a documentation tool and your first task being learning how to work around what feels like a missing feature that has been more or less standard elsewhere since the 90s. 

More like 2004 lol https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-1208

Intending to use Confluence for process documentation and stumbled across the inability to continue numbering when inserting a simple Expand. Seems like a basic need.

Has there been any progress on this? I ran into this issue today. Thanks!

Thank you Jay! Hopefully enough people retweet that @Atlassian finally does something about this.

Blows my mind that 2 years later, with that many views, and it's still "Gathering Interest".

OK - I've taken this to Twitter lol... I'm not hopeful
https://twitter.com/jayantoney/status/1521970585911570432

EDIT 2022/05/05 - It seems I forgot to tag @Confluence in the original tweet. I've updated & new link above
Found the @Atlassian and @AskAtlassian tags as well

I need to be able to add a table in-between numbered items. This is making feature documentation needlessly time consuming. Huge problem. Just let me pick the number to restart numbering.

Top number of views for "How to continue a numbered list" 138,070 !!! 

Product feedback is simply dysfunctional

Ian, like you, I have had this issue for years now - and with my current job - developing documentation for an IT infrastructure, it is proving a nightmare - Confluence cloud, is simply not a good platform for the kinds of procedural documentation we use. I believe that Confluence is controlled by it's developers - who have a very limited use for word-processing features, which is reflected in the very way all the apps work or don't work.

When I look at the issues in Confluence, there just don't seem to be the number of people flagging the issue, and developers being narrow-minded simply accept this as meaning it is not an issue and putting the whole issue on the back burner.

Once you get used to the novelty of the Confluence environment, with it's 'cute' little apps, you suddenly realise that in reality, you just don't need them and you're left with a very inflexible platform. Personally, I would hate to have a document of a couple of hundred pages to ever try to edit in Confluence. We'll probably reach a stage of morbidity with Confluence and move away from the platform.

Confluence is great as a notebook/scratch pad for individuals but that's all - a very expensive notepad. 

What's really galling, is that you can buy an editor for confluence that will allow you to resolve the numbered list problem. But a) it has a price based on the total number of users and b) why should we pay for a documentation environment that simply does not work - fix it!

We're going on 1.5 years from when I initially had this issue created and still no resolution.
This is a request my users bring to me at least once per week, every week, since we moved to this platform over 2 years ago.

In all this time is there still no better solution? This feature (and some regarding tables & images) is by far the biggest hurdle we have to cross during new user onboarding, and very well might be a contributing reason for us moving off this platform in the end.

We're a tech company operating in the data center space. We have technical documentation with code blocks, diagrams, tables, etc. It's becoming clear that Confluence just isn't intended for an org with documentation needs like ours.

It is a major nightmare for creating decent documentation. Code blocks have to be put at the end of the article, which is meaningless. Buying a 3rd party app just to resolve the editing is not a solution when you have a lot of users even if you are the only one who needs to use the app - you get charged for all users. It seems crazy that the most basic item in using numbered lists is not available and thousands of documents are having to be manually edited to add continued numbered lists. 

In addition to this, adding a note/info panel or any other break in the list results in not being able to re-start the numbered list.

+1 to Ian's comment

"This could be easily resolved by adding an option on numbered lists to specify at what sequence the list should start."

Further discussion/comments and interest in this being resolved over here: Feature request: Allow numbered lists to continue ... (atlassian.com)

This could be easily resolved by adding an option on numbered lists to specify at what sequence the list should start. Similar to how there is an option dialogue for tables for customization, or the option dialogue in the layout macro to specify format.

Not only would this resolve the inability to use layouts and numbered lists together, it would also eliminate the need to rely on using a workaround (shift+enter) for inserting images into numbered lists.

The way we currently use layouts and numbers is: layout macro, text on the left, and a single-cell table on the right with the image inside. This results in a very clean look to our technical documentation where the image is always directly to the right of the relevant step in the process.
The reason for putting images inside a single-cell table is to create an outline (thin-walled box) around the image -very useful when the image has a white border (such as a screenshot of a webpage or options menu) that would otherwise blend into the white background of the confluence page.