4 ways to highlight text in Confluence Cloud

How to highlight Confluence text

Option 1: Page comments

Best for: Adding quick memos or collaborating with teammates on internal documents

Benefits:

• Highlighting is quick and easy, with no macros needed.
• Anyone can highlight text, even if they don't have permission to edit the page.

Limitations:

• Highlighting lots of text clutters the page with comments, making it harder to read.
• It can look unprofessional, especially on external or customer-facing pages.
• It's temporary - the text only stays highlighted while your comment remains unsolved.

Option 2: Status macro

Best for: Highlighting status updates, tasks, and other short messages on your Confluence page

Benefits:

• It's small, sleek, and fits easily inside table cells and other macros.
• You can highlight text in a few different colours, which helps to add context (e.g. if the text is highlighted in red, it suggests something negative).
  
  

Limitations:

• It supports a maximum of 29 characters, making it unsuitable for longer messages.
• The text size is small, and you can't change its size using the Text Styles dropdown, which isn't useful for larger headings.

Option 3: Panel macro

Best for: Adding callout boxes for important hints, notes, and warnings

Benefits:

• A variety of background colours and icons (including emojis) lets you highlight text in a more eye-catching way. It’s also possible to change the text colour.
• You can add text on multiple lines, making it useful for longer messages.
• It's possible to change the size of text with the Text Styles dropdown menu, which means you can add a heading.

Limitations:

• The background is still limited to 21 shades, which isn't ideal for Confluence pages with company branding.
• The panel automatically scales to the width of your Confluence content, meaning text can look lost if the message is short.
• You can’t embed media, making it unsuitable for messages with images.

Option 4: Background macro (from Content Formatting Macros for Confluence)

Best for: Making Confluence content infinitely more engaging and creating stand-out sections on branded pages

Benefits:

• An incredibly versatile macro that lets you highlight content any way you want.
• The only solution that lets you highlight text and other content, such as images, a search bar, buttons, and numbered headings.
• Highlight with any colour or upload an image instead (you can even use Pexels' built-in library to find one that fits your theme).
• Choose from custom dimensions - whether you want a tiny callout box or a striking banner, you can achieve both.

Limitations:

• As it's an external app, you need admin permissions to install it on your Confluence instance.
• For teams of more than 10, the app is paid (annually or monthly). The good news is you can try it free for 30 days with access before you make a commitment.