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Customize your space's overview

When you create a space, Confluence automatically creates an overview for that space. Spaces created with a blueprint come with a ready-made overview populated with useful macros and sample content specific to the blueprint's use case.

However, even if you've started with a blank space, you can still customize your overview to make it easier for everyone using that space to navigate their way around and find useful content.

Create a stellar overview

The overview is the first page visitors will see when they visit your space, so it helps to include some information on what the space is about and what your team is working on. Try out these tips to create an effective (and attractive) introduction to your space:

  • Add a header image. This gives your overview visual appeal and makes it welcoming for visitors. To add a header image, hover over the page title and select Add header image, then upload a file from your computer.

  • Explain what the space is for. Start by summarizing the purpose of the space. This could be your team’s mission statement or a brief description of the kind of work you do. If you’d like, you can put this information in an info or note panel to make it pop on the page.

  • Share team goals. Add links to your team’s OKRs, project plans, and product roadmaps so visitors can quickly get a sense of your team’s goals. You can also use the excerpt include macro to display a portion of these pages directly in the overview.

  • Tell people how to contact you. Share your timezone and links to Slack channels, email aliases, or other contact details your team uses so visitors can contact you with questions or feedback about your team’s work.

  • List contributors to the space. Use the user profile macro to display a short summary of a specific Confluence user, including their profile photo, role, and contact details.

  • Display a list of important pages. Paste in page URLs to create smart links, or use the content report table macro to create a list of all the pages in the space.

You can adjust the macro settings to display only content with a specific label, so if you’d only like to display some pages, you can add a label to just those pages and reference it in the macro on the overview.

  • Add a search box to help people find content. Use the livesearch macro to add a search box to the overview, then adjust the macro settings so the search only returns results from the current space.

  • Share updates automatically. Use the recently updated macro to display a list of content that has been updated most recently. You can adjust the macro settings to display content from the current space only, or from related spaces as well.

  • Show off team progress. If your Confluence site is connected to Jira, you can use the Jira issues macro to display a list of issues your team is working on.

Start with a template

If creating an overview from scratch is intimidating, you can use a template instead. To do this, you’ll need to create a new page, publish it in the space, and set it as the space overview.

There are several templates you can use to create your overview, depending on your needs:

You can find a full list of Confluence templates here.

Top macros for common types of spaces

Team Spaces

  • Introduce the team: The Insert the user profile macro displays a short summary of a given Confluence user's profile with their role, profile photo and contact details.

  • Share news and announcements with your team: The blog posts macro displays a stream of your latest blog posts so your team can easily see what's been going on.

Knowledge Base

  • Have external content that you need on your page? Embed online videos, slideshows, photo streams, and more, directly into your page with the widget connector macro.

  • Create an index of all your content: The page index macro creates a hyperlinked alphabetical index of all page titles within the current space.

Planning/Project

  • Keep track of everyone's tasks: Use the task report macro to display a list of tasks on a page. Filter the tasks by space, page, user, label, created date and more.

  • Is your project on track? Type /status to display a colored lozenge (a rounded box) that you can use to report project status. You choose the color of the lozenge and the text that appears inside it.

  • Let everyone see where you're going: The roadmap planner macro creates simple, visual timelines that are useful for planning projects, software releases and much more.

To add a macro to your page:

  • In the new editor: Type / into the editor, then use the arrow keys to browse the list of suggested macros. When you find the one you want to use, hit enter to select it.

  • In the legacy editor: Type { into the editor, then use the arrow keys to browse the list of suggested macros. When you find the one you want to use, hit enter to select it.

For more info, see Keyboard shortcuts, markdown, and autocomplete.

To edit an existing macro, click the macro placeholder and choose Edit. A macro dialog window will open, where you can edit the parameters of the macro.

Create an overview for your personal space

Whether you're using your personal space as a sandbox to draft and test content, a portfolio to show off what you're working on, a home base to navigate to your content in other spaces, or something completely different, these are some macros that should help you use your space more effectively.

  • Use the task report macro to keep track of all tasks assigned to you, and tick them off as you finish them.

  • Use the recently updated dashboard macro to keep track of all the content across your Confluence site that you're interested in ­the Dashboard lets you choose which spaces, users, blogs, pages or files you would like to keep updated about.

Set another page as your overview

You can set any page in a space as the overview.

To set an existing page as your overview:

  1. Go to the space in Confluence Cloud.

  2. Select Space settings from the sidebar. 

  3. Select Space details from the Manage space card.

  4. Select Edit Space Details.

  5. In the Home page field, enter the title of the page you’d like to use for your overview.

  6. Select Save.

To use a template to create a space overview (such as this Team homepage template from hubspot), you’ll need to create a new page from the template first, then publish to the space, and then set it as the space overview.

In edit space details, you can update a space's name, description, and status, or select a page in the space as the homepage.

Because the Pages section of the space sidebar displays children of the space overview, it may not display the same pages that it did before.

To make pages appear in the sidebar:

  1. Select Space settings from the sidebar. 

  2. Select Reorder from the Manage pages card.

  3. Drag the pages so that they are nested under the page you’ve selected as the overview.

  4. Refresh the page to see your changes reflected in the sidebar.

Ownership of space overview pages cannot currently be transferred.

Additional Help