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.

See update 21st Nov, sorry no update at this time.

You can expect to hear an update on this suggestion from us in the next 6 months.

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 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.

+1 on all previous posts. This is so silly that custom colors can be easily specified in the table UI with a color picker. In addition to a custom color picker and greatly expanded palette of commonly used colors (primary, secondary and tertiary), I would also want as much control as MediaWiki allows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_colours

Atlassian, please update the "affects version" to include all the 5.x versions. Then add it to your roadmap to address this request !!!!!
This is a very popular request by many customers, for several years now. (see also the other linked tickets and their comments)

I previously posted in a closed ticket but just found this open ticket ....

Agree with the others above. We have just upgraded from 4.2.8 to 5.2.6, primarily to take advantage of improved tables functionality and the colour backgrounds.

We could not believe it when we went to start applying the background colours and found a palette of only 5 colours and no picker. Totally ridiculous. It's 2014 not the 1990's!

We're a software company with a variety of internal and external spaces and a number of software products. We need a decent selection of tables background colours so we can consistently match the documentation to the particular products (eg. the primary colour in the logo and desktop of each application) and provide a professional appearance to thousands of customers.

How is this not a STANDARD feature in Confluence? Closing the issue in 4.3 by adding 5 colours is like a builder being commissioned to build a house but simply pitching a tent and saying "Job done!"

We would really use the ability to set custom colors. The colors that are available are just too light and too limited. Since we are beyond the days of limited colors and even web-safe colors, we should be able to have a color picker.

This issue affects all versions of Confluence that I am aware of not just 4.3.5. Could you update the affected versions to include the 5.x line, please?

I can confirm on 5.1.2 specifically

Please give us more color options!

5 pastel colors are not cutting for us either. The basic Red/Yellow/Green colors would be super beneficial. The pastel colors don't render very well when looking straight at a monitor

We are doing a similar thing as the David Bennet but for our Software Release Schedule and as per his issue the colours are effectively the content. On Dokuwiki we were able to use striking and opposing colours but Confluence does not afford us the same depth of palette.

For us, we are building a timeline in confluence, and want to indicate stoplight colors for certain things (green/yellow/red). The problem is that the default green/yellow/red are very pastel, and fade into the background on many monitors. I need higher contrast colors which will grab attention - the color is the content, not the background for some other content.

As some context for our use case, it would also be nice to be able to edit the border around some of these. Being able to include a dotted line border around some of the items (indicating that it is speculative) vs a dark double border (indicating a strong certainty) would be extremely helpful. We are trying to create a visually approachable display, and it just isn't possible with the current capabilities.

This is one of the examples demonstrating that Atlassians constantly ignores the user community requests.
There is a Jira entry (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-27496) since March 2013 on this issue, which can be voted for.

For now I have tweaked the css style sheet to get more contrast to the colors.

It would be helpful to be able to select other colors as well or modify the default ones easily. I received feedback from someone that it's hard to see a cell which has a yellow background when the rest of the screen is mainly white.

This sure would be nice, lots of use cases and reasons for more color options (or customizable)

This really is something Admins should be able to define... better yet, implement a global default defined by Confluence admins and allow space admins to define it at the space level.

Agreed - more colours would be a great help.

We'd also like to pick more background colors. As Confluence tables improve, we have more and more cases where we can almost just use a wiki table instead of an attached Excel file, or a Google Spreadsheet. Anything we can do to format the tables more nicely is a step in the right direction.

Use case - Our builds use many different base builds (due to many release and development branches that we have) and we have more than 10 base builds. We want to keep track of our servers, their current versions, and color the cells based off of what base build they use. Since we only have 6 colors (with one of them being striped) and it doesn't support hex colors or color picker, we are limited in how we can setup our tables and server tracking.

Also the pastel colors don't match our confluence theme and the color schemes our projects use so the table colors look out of place.

Please add support for a color picker/hex codes for both the background and font.

Please adding more colors to the list. We need it too.

I'll like to request this, too.
See also https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-27496. Now we have even more people requesting this.