Here’s the scenario: You’re working on a Confluence page and there are some key text elements that you want to highlight. What would you do? Obviously, you have a variety of options to choose from, both native and third party such as comments, tooltips, and more.
In this article we’ll explore and evaluate all available options and how to choose between them.
But first, why highlight text in Confluence?
We’ve all been there. You access a Confluence page only to hit a wall of text with little to no formatting. The reading experience will obviously be bad and you’re not going to engage with the text, or even worse, miss some important information. And this is why you need to highlight text across your Confluence pages. Properly highlighted text can help you:
Put forward important elements & enhance readability:
As a reader, there are two ways to distinguish between important and less important information. The first one is to read the entire page and grasp the context. The second one is to look for visual cues. Safe to say, you want your readers to pinpoint key elements upon accessing the page and performing their first scan. This saves time, provides important information first, and gives them control over continuing to read or skipping all together.
Improve collaboration:
When collaborating on the same page, the key is to ensure everyone is on the same page by documenting changes and leaving instructions. One simple way to do this is to highlight the changes using inline comments or status updates. This helps reduce back-and-forth and avoid any miscommunication.
Drive action:
Highlighting isn’t just about making something stand out—it’s about steering your audience toward the next logical step. Whether it’s a link to another resource, a form to fill out, or a task to complete, visual cues can act as subtle (or not-so-subtle) calls to action. They reduce friction and make navigation more intuitive.
Increase long-term usability:
Pages evolve. What’s important today might not be tomorrow. But consistent visual hierarchy through highlighting and formatting makes it easier to revisit old pages and still quickly understand the main takeaways. Think of it as future-proofing your documentation for later reuse and faster onboarding.
Different ways to highlight text in Confluence
The basics: Use the text editor
If you’re looking for a quick and quite effective way to highlight text, then the Confluence text editor is perfect for you. And the options you have here are quite impressive. My favorite way to highlight text is a combination of bold and underlined. You can change the text color, background, add headers, you name it.
Leaving notes: Use inline comments
This one is pretty-much straightforward. If you’re looking to pinpoint specific parts of the text without changing the content itself, then you simply go with inline comments.
They’re useful when a team is editing or reviewing content together. Instead of writing a separate message or summarizing your feedback in a Slack thread or email, you can directly drop comments right next to the part in question. It saves time, avoids confusion, and keeps the conversation in context.
Adding context: Use tooltips
Sometimes, what you need isn’t to emphasize text, it’s to explain it without cluttering the page. And here, tooltips are your best bet. They’re specially designed to provide context, explanations, and guidance right where your readers need them without cluttering the content.
Tooltips don’t come natively in Confluence, you need a dedicated formatting toolkit for that.
Highlighting important content: Use Panels
What if you want to highlight pro tips, warnings or important notes, within your Confluence page? Using the text editor can do the job, but you can take it a step further with customizable panels. They’re more effective in grabbing attention and come with advanced customization features like adding icons, borders, aligning text, and more. You’ve probably seen panels with product documentations or space homepages with colored borders and icons like 💡 or ⚠️.
Tracking updates: Use content status
As mentioned earlier, highlighting text in Confluence is key to enable effective collaboration and keep everyone on the same page. More often than not, the first thing we see upon accessing a Confluence page is a status update. Here, the page owner(s) indicate the current state of the content—whether it’s a draft, under review, finalized, or any other status along with a brief message. This simple visual cue helps readers instantly understand what’s expected of them, whether they should take action, provide feedback, or simply stay informed.
You can use the native status macro in Confluence that can be included on top of the page, or the one that can be included within the content. For more customization and the ability to include messages, we recommend the use of third party apps such as our very own Content Status for Confluence Cloud. The latter helps you include content statues, define a status list per space, and even visualize statutes within a centralized dashboard.
Defining terms: Use the highlight engine (from Glossary for Confluence)
Highlighting text in Confluence depends on the content you want to put forward. When it comes to terms, you can use tooltips to attach definitions. The drawback here is that the definitions will not be stored anywhere within your Confluence site. They only live within the tooltips.
With Glossary’s Highlight Engine, the terms created within your glossaries are automatically highlighted and linked wherever they appear in Confluence. This ensures consistency, improves understanding, and saves time by giving readers instant access to definitions without cluttering the page. It also centralizes your terminology management, making it easier to update and scale documentation as your organization grows.
And there you have it! Highlighting text in Confluence is key to enhance navigation, facilitate access to key information, and enable effective collaboration. There are a host of features and dedicated apps to choose from. The choice depends on the nature of content, the text you want to highlight, and of course, your audience preferences. Whichever method you choose, the goal is the same: make your content easier to read, act on, and remember.
