RSS

Transforming even more colors from Confluence to SharePoint!

This post describes the latest additions and changes with regard to text colors, highlight colors, and table cell colors.
By Heinrich Ulbricht |

The latest release of WikiTraccs contains multiple improvements with regard to colors.

Text colors, the newly introduced text highlight colors (Confluence Cloud) and table cell colors got some attention.

What has SharePoint Online to offer in terms of colors?

The SharePoint Online color palette for text looks like this:

Note that we cannot really use the theme colors as they change, depending on the theme. That leaves us with 11 text colors.

The SharePoint Online color palette for highlights looks like this:

That’s a whopping 15 colors.

What about table cell colors? SharePoint does not have those. We’ll see how WikiTraccs handles that further down.

Text Color Transformation

Those are the 21 text colors available (at least at the moment) in Confluence Cloud:

Text Colors in Confluence Cloud

WikiTraccs maps those colors to the visually nearest available text color in SharePoint Online:

Text Colors in SharePoint Online

Here’s another example from Confluence Server, which has 40 colors to offer:

Text Colors in Confluence Server 6

This is how it’s transformed to SharePoint:

Text Colors in SharePoint Online

Highlight Color Transformation (new)

Now for the new highlight colors in Confluence Cloud:

Highlights in Confluence Cloud

Those map pretty well to SharePoint Online in terms of available colors:

Highlights in SharePoint Online

SharePoint’s highlight colors are way darker than in Confluence which makes black text hard to read for the teal and purple highlights.

Table Cell Color Transformation

Here’s how table cell colors look in Confluence Cloud:

Table cell colors in Confluence Cloud

SharePoint does not support setting colors for table cells. Maybe that’s coming in the future, but so far I did not spot anything related on the roadmap. (Let me know if you see or hear something!)

WikiTraccs is using a workaround to at least indicate in SharePoint, that the table cell was colored in Confluence.

"Table cell colors" in SharePoint Online

Here’s another sample from Confluence Server 6, which has less cell colors to offer:

Table cell colors in Confluence Server 6

This is how it’s transformed to SharePoint:

Table cell colors in Confluence Server 6

In both instances, WikiTraccs adds a block of colored spaces to each formerly colored table cell, serving as a “color marker”. And again, it is restricted to colors that SharePoint has to offer.

What did change in the latest WikiTraccs release?

The latest release handles text highlight colors that have been introduced by Atlassian in June 2024.

Furthermore, the color markers for table cells now support the full range of text colors available in SharePoint. Previously, WikiTraccs used colored emoji squares like 🟩 as marker - but those only come in very few colors.

And last but not least: the algorithm to calculate the visual distance between colors has been improved. This maps Confluence colors even more closely to their SharePoint equivalents.