Are you new to Confluence? No problem! In this article, we’ll cover the basics of Confluence’s interface and how to interact with the application.

The Central Area

The main interface is divided into three sections: the central area, the left-hand sidebar, and the right-hand sidebar. The central area is where you will see a history of all the different pages that you’ve most recently been working on.

You can expand this by doing “Show More” and it will give you a comprehensive list of the different pages and spaces that you’ve been working on. The pages shown in bold and the space is shown underneath it as well as the date last visited.

The Left-Hand Sidebar

If we return home, the left-hand sidebar then gives the overview, which is this page here.

Also, you can see starred pages, which are essentially a way to favourite pages so that you can quickly travel back to them as necessary. Finally, you can click “Drafts” to show any pages that are still in the draft status, i.e. have not yet been published.

The Right-Hand Sidebar

So, returning home and then looking at the right-hand sidebar, this is where you can see an overview of the different spaces.

If you click “Show More,” it will show all of the spaces within the site. Now, from both of these sidebars, it’s possible to access your personal space. You can do so either by clicking on the space named after your own name or by clicking anywhere on your initials (in the top left of the Confluence interface) or on “Go to personal space.”

Personal Space

The personal space is, as its name suggests, a space that is personal to you. So this would be a good place to have any documents that you wouldn’t want to share with the wider team, i.e. personal development goals or 1 to 1 catch up notes.

Top Sidebar

Now, if I return home, there is also this top sidebar which is accessible actually from any page. So, “Home” obviously brings you to this home page and then you have “Recents” where you’re able to view all recent pages you’ve been working on and these can actually be filtered by different categories.

So one particularly useful one is “Created by Me.” This is especially useful if you’re working in a larger team because this will only show the subset of pages that were actually created by yourself. And then you can again navigate to the different spaces from here.

You also have the ability to create a space from this menu which is identical to clicking “Create a space” from the right-hand sidebar. You can then view different people within your team, access apps if you have the permissions to do so, and cover templates as well.

Create Button

The most important button to look at in the Confluence interface here is this “Create” button here, which we’ll be using when we actually start to create pages in subsequent lectures.

Conclusion

Now that you know the basics of Confluence’s interface, it’s time to dive into actually creating some content!

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