The light colors are not very good for accessibility, way too faint

Atlassian, please add more colors.

Small things like this one impact adoption more than you may expect. People compare such a platform mostly with what they can do in Microsoft Word documents.... (no need to debate whether that comparison is valid or not).

This seems ridiculous - now well over a year since any update from Atlassian. This is similar to a number of issues that I have voted on and follow both for Confluence and JIRA. CONFSERVER-7118 which would allow cut and paste an excel table while retaining cell and text colors has been open since 2006 - not nearly as many votes but nonetheless something many other editors handle flawlessly. 

Please Atlassian -Improve your editor!

Hahaha! Incredible! In which version did they add two more colors?

Maybe going from 5 colors to 7 was Atlassiasn's way of placating us!

Hi All,

  See my last comment 2+ years(09th Mar 2017). 

This is 2019, back when I started working with computers we had more than 5 colors and that was back in 1984.

The ticket is dated 2012 and I have seen older tickets with the same issue.

Should we start considering other tools, there are other systems that can do what Atlassian/Confluence can just a whole lot better and also import from atlassian.

EMBARRASSING !!!!!!

There's actually a hack on how to do it

http://gustelev.ru/adding-new-colors-to-the-palette-for-a-table-cell-highlighting-in-confluence/

Welcome to the Community, Ville. I've myself been fortunate to be a part of this community for many years now. Among many of the good advises for a happy life, it's one about being part of something that is greater than yourself. And to some extent, even perhaps distant, let's hope this "cell highlight colors" issue can bring humanity closer together. Wish you all the best going forward

Today I joined the merry community of CONSERVER-27618.

Humans may set foot on Mars before Atlassian figures out how to add a few extra highlight color options to their Confluence UI.

To gain the appropriate insight to the longevity of this request, read - thedavidmo's comment from 08/Oct/2018 10:33 AM or the initial request from 2013.

@Eric you realise that was November 2017 right? The "update" is basically a year late  so you can expect any development to be similarly tardy. I don't even use Confluence anymore but I occasionally come back for the lols.

November + 6 months = April ! Can't wait ! 

Any news?....

Hi Team,

Can you please provide us any specific date when this might be implemented. 

Hi Rick,

it's a part of this free plugin here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1210722/confluence-source-editor?hosting=server&tab=overview

my bad, i should have mentioned that.

I would love to just edit the HTML, but as full admin, I don't see <> in my upper right.  Is there a trick to seeing this?

Posting this here in case it can help anyone:

If you go into edit mode on a confluence page and look to the top right you'll see a  '<>' symbol. If you click this you can see the HTML for the page. Although it is by far not ideal you can use inline CSS here to force the background colors to be whatever you like. Standard HTML table structure looks like this:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>heading 1</th>
    <th>heading 2</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1</td>
    <td>Data 2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

if you add a space and then style="background-color:#000000" to any of these you can change the background on different parts of the table. #000000 represents the hex code for the color you want, this can usually be found with a quick google search. Adding the code to different tags does the following:

I hope this helps someone

Atlassian Update - November 2017

We are currently working on improvements to the editing experience and hope to address this request in the near future. You can expect to hear an update on this suggestion from us in the next 6 months.

Now it is December 2018.  How long are 6 months in the Atlassian Universe? 

(Perhaps Atlassian works close to light speed, so it appears longer for us than to them?)

No offense to any of the people bonding over sharing this issue, but I do not plan to be a perpetual member of a hardship club. I'll be figuring out how to remove these notices from my already busy life and when Confluence comes up in conversation I'll be sure to mention this ridiculous situation.

6 years for a minor change :o and here I was thinking our backlog was tiresome!

Any news here?

I have to believe this is low hanging fruit, will something critical break if Atlassian updates the pallet to include say, 256 colors (sorry... 'colours')?

And this issue isn't even old yet Please have a look: JRASERVER-1391

There's even 15 year cake

thedavidmo Thanks for a little bit of light concerning this topic. I think CONFSERVER-27618 will survive a nuclear holocaust even, but it's cool to see how it brings us together in the now.

Cheers from Norway!

Thank you @thedavidmo for your delightful comment!  I too have undergone many life changes since I last viewed this Suggestion.  My youngest has graduated from high school.  I've invested funds equivalent to a small house in my children's college educations.  (Start saving now for that baby!)

I also changed jobs.  I moved from a Fortune 150 to the largest defense contractor in the world (and we are one of those huge license owners.)  I'm no longer the Atlassian administrator at my new company, but somehow I can't shake my Atlassian Evangelist role.  (The bigger your company the older and crappier your tools and methods.)  I've used my lovely new training in Culture of Accountability (book not recommended) to Drive Change! and Shatter Silos! by actually having our teams document (gasp!) their methods and processes in Confluence.  (In case they get hit by a bus - too many people get hit by a bus in this world - the retirement bus, the F-this job bus, event the elusive lottery bus...) Which means I still daily answer "how do I?" and "why can't I?" questions about several Atlassian products, including Confluence. 

An improved palette of colors for Confluence would brighten both my day and my Spaces, but probably not as much as this stream of superior Comments on this ancient suggestion.  So don't ever change Confluence!  We will still love you! (Because there is no alternative licensed product at my company.)

And @thedavidmo, your comment will be printed and posted on my cubicle wall as the best example of a complaint about poor responsiveness to a software improvement request I've seen this decade.  We who are about to go back to our pale, washed out Confluence colors salute you!

Wow this request is 6 years old now. After fishing for a moment I found out we were limited in colors and found this request.

Spend a minute to expand your pallet Confluence!

@david.alexander.morris  That made my day

@thedavidmo That has got to be the best "baseball bat wrapped in velvet" comment of all time.  I salute you!  

And yes, the current palette is way too limited and very washed-out looking.  On a non-premium monitor with limited viewing angles, someone standing behind me and pointing at my screen can't even see the shading.  The info/error/warning macro colors seem to have also "gone soft" in recent years so that they are barely noticeable.

Thanks for putting this into "perspective". 

l we have a 5-year-Ticket celebration party then?
In 10 years again?

On one hand, I like to read that many people fase the same problems that we do.

We're not a "big player", we don't have a 20k+ License. Nonetheless, we pay a fortune for the license.

Now @Atlassian raised the license cost again, and not litte. Why? To support us, the community, better, to solve our tickets faster.
I guess the mail has been send on April 1st, but the Atlassian mail client sent it just recently.
Else I can not explain the joke, which, IMHO, it is.

If we all would stop paying the hughe license fee, for one year only, maybe they'll listen.
Or am I wrong? If we pay 10k$ annually for "updates", I could afford to employ one person for 3-4 month...which probably could maintain our site.

But anyway, glad you're all here folks, I'm glad to be part of the community

BR
Chris

At first I marveled at the refusal to implement this dead simple request–but then I began to understand. This isn't about the color palette for tables. This is about people. It's about community. It's about what I now think of as my "second family"–that's right, all of you, from all around the world, who have joined hands around CONFSERVER-27618.

When I first commented on this issue way back on New Year's Eve in  2014, I was in a much different place in my life. I was single; I was living in San Francisco. Since then a lot has happened: the company I worked at went out of business. I got a job at a startup–and then that company, too, went of business. So I got another job, which I've been happy at for over two years now. I started dating a girl; then we got engaged; then we got married. We lived in China for a year and now we live in New York City, and we have a little girl due in December–right around the 5 year anniversary of my comment on CONSERVER-27618.

At this point I don't want them to fix this, because it would be an end to the trickle of email updates from befuddled engineers, PMs, and others around the world who are just trying to make a table cell red. Their struggle reaffirms the bond of our common humanity. I feel a spiritual connection to you all that would disappear in an instant if an Atlassian engineer were ever to take 10 minutes to add a few colors to the palette–or 15 minutes to implement a basic color picker. I pray it doesn't happen, and have faith it never will.

I look forward to the years ahead: watching my child grow up, moving on to the next phase of life. And I'm so grateful that through it all there will be CONFSERVER-27618 by my side, as it always has been. 

I'll send another update when my kid graduates college. Hope you're all doing well.

Regards,
David

Perhaps being able to enter our own color hex values would be great.

Please add more colours, even if you doubled the current palette it would be a good start. 

we need this feature soon

Team Atalassian can we please have an update on the color palette offering?  

Thanks

Eugene

It's crazy that you can't change these colors, they aren't even ADA / WCAG compliant.  Atlassian isn't doing us or anyone any accessibility favors with these terrible uneditable default colors.

Really surprised to find I only have the option to use 5 pastel colours in cells. I really want to create a process flow that's totally editable in a table within Confluence. I'd expect to at least be able to select from standard web safe colours but would prefer entering a hex code.

any ETA?

we need this feature soon. 
The color options are way too less and we need a better palette for creating rich documentations.

^^ I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for features users actually need. Atlassian is too busy trying to polish their slow, broken, new UI no one wanted.

So basically the email announcement was "You might see this by March 2019. Or you might not."

That's terrific.

We have colored tabular data that we would like to  display and edit in Confluence. The lack of flexible colors prevents us from doing this. As with other commenters, we think it is surprising that Confluence is limited to fixed color. We would rather not resort to a different documenting solution like Airtable.

I am a little puzzled to find that only fixed colors can be used.

I would like to be able to select freely.

Very frustrated. This is a required feature!

I just don't understand Atlassian's lack of action on this issue. Hundreds of customers want this simple change (and this doesn't include the ones who have seen how old this ticket is and not bothered to post or vote) yet they do nothing for over 5 years and then post a short statement saying "expect to hear an update on this suggestion from us in the next 6 months" ... what? Another 6 months of no action and then the best we can hope for is an "update"?

We are your customers ... If there is a reason behind the lack of action, please tell us. If something is happening in the background that will actually resolve the problem in 6 months, at least tell us this much. Sorry, but "an update on this suggestion from us in the next 6 months" shows no commitment to action and generates very little hope or faith in Atlassian. 

Not a developer myself but I work for a software company. If we treated our customers like this we would be out of business.

Very frustrated.

Yeah, I was about to ask if Vasili's solution would be permanent, and Jan-Peter answered that. I had a feeling updates would reset things though...

Christian, go ahead with Vasiliis solution. You will not be able to upgrade your Confluence instance easily anymore. As Atlassian plans to update the TinyMCE editor component in one of the upcoming releases (TinyMCE 4) I wouldn't rely & go on that solution...

Actually, Vasilii has a solution. And it is really easy. Thank you for that by the way.

IMHO Atlassian can just take that and implement it into the common source, can't they? 30 Mins work for me, probably 10 Min for them?

But let's wait for 4 years to celebrate another 10-year-ticket

Bump.

Is there any update on the abarnes@atlassian.com ?

There is a workaround for those who can't wait: http://gustelev.ru/adding-new-colors-to-the-palette-for-a-table-cell-highlighting-in-confluence/

Great news Adam, thanks,

Surely implementing this feature very soon would be a better response than hear[ing] an update on this suggestion from [you] in the next 6 months?

As has been pointed out, this is a pretty basic feature request which has been overwhelmingly supported by the Confluence community. Companies are not fond of making purchase decisions based on promises of noncommittal updates half a year away... Is there some reason we aren't aware of that this can not be developed and deployed within a few weeks?
Cheers,
Joel

I second what Johan and Dave is saying. The impression I have of Confluence is exactly what Dave is saying:
"A patchwork quilt of plugins shouldn't be required to get decent formatting capabilities in confluence."

Minor things (like this suggestion for example), shouldn't be solved by plugins. It should be a part of the core product.

Well said everyone, its completely absurd that Atlassian can't get it together and address such an elementary feature request after 4 years.

Agree with Johan and Dave.

This goes beyond just the lack of this particular feature (which, as many others have commented, is ridiculous in 2017) to a certain arrogance on the part of Atlassian. What’s the point in having a public issue tracker if you are just going to ignore even the most popular feature requests, for years on end?

The lack of community engagement is simply unacceptable in today’s tech world. I for one will always advocate choosing an alternative to Atlassian products because of this.

Agreed - and well said. 

Beautiful comment by Johan. Atlassian really needs to decide what they consider to be core functionality in each of their products and work to make the user experience best in class for those items. For too long, Atlassian has been content to let plugin developers try to fill in the gap. A patchwork quilt of plugins shouldn't be required to get decent formatting capabilities in confluence.

To Atlassian,

A big percentage of users of Confluence are probably, like me, developers or technical architects. The fact that you do not offer an editor that is even on par with open source editors now in 2017 is truly disappointing. The symptom of not even, 2017 (soon 2018), having basic functionality like selectable table borders, color pickers, selectable headlines etc. in place is nothing more than ridiculous. The formatting is not even robust and there are several formatting bugs (especially copy&past formatted areas with lists and bullets that drives me crazy).

I have built products where editing was just a small part of a product and I would have been ashamed to offer customers this kind of editing experience. This is, 2017, simple to get in place (and I'm using the word "simple" in the professional software engineering sense). To have a product where the core focus is document editing and not have a professional quality editor in place is beyond me.

Take a step back, address your core offering, ask yourself what is the soul of your product and what is truly important for customers. 

The whole idea with confluence is to offer the possibility to create documents without having to create separate files as attachments using standalone tools like (Word, Pages etc.). Today the formatting, and robustness, of the editor is so poor that this is not really possible and I cannot recommend using Confluence for anything above the bare bones text with headers. Even the export functionality to say, PDF, is so buggy that anything more complicated than plain text in one column comes out so bad that the functionality is pretty useless. But now I'm digressing.

The fact that Atlassian hasn't even commented on this after several years is truly mind-boggling.

Come on!

If you don't have in house capacity I can help with suggestions for developers, all around the world, that would be happy to help you address this and have a new editor solution in place in few months time.

Please add the ability to set the cell color by a real color picker https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/

agree...

Agreed... 

There are so many "me, also" comments here. Clearly Atlassian does not want to do this. I'm going to un-watch this issue - too depressing.

I would very much like this also - I need to flag cells as Red / Amber / Green in tables shared in Confluence

Have just created a personal support request ticket with a link to this JIRA issue as it would seem that Atlassian do not take any notice of new comments posted here.  We all think this issue needs resolving and closing: either "won't fix" or preferably improve the choices available in the interface, doesn't seem like too much to ask?

Even with the new release for the GUI (which happened on a Monday night, which is weird)... we STILL dont have better options for table cell coloring.

Wow! this is open since 2012!

This is really needed and sounds like a very basic feature request. Can we get this to done? It's been here for so long...

Would love it if you guys can allow for more colors. This doesn't seem too difficult to do, correct em if I'm wrong?

Goodness sake Atlassian this is basic stuff

Hey Folks,

This issue is a  deterrent  for Most users. Please fix this issue asap and help a large community of Confluence users.

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.