Calculate and report on empty cells
Asked by Andrew Skinner:

Hi All,

I've been playing around the with Pivot table and the table plus macro and whilst these can add and calculate numbers, it doesn't however have the functionality I'm after. I'm after a means of assessing the completeness of a document, a simple cell calculation. If there are 200 cells within one document, then the score would be ### / 200 pending the count of null cells. I've looked at the reporting macro, though this seems fairly expensive, i was wondering if anyone in the broader community had seen, or, is aware of a solution of this problem.

the ideal solution would be that each page would have a total for that page and each page is collated into a separate page - E.g. 10 out of 15 pages have 100/200 completeness.


Answers:
author: Rob Woodgate
body: Hi Andrew,

There may or may not be a solution to this, but if you want this level of complexity/calculation why not just embed an Excel file in your page with appropriate calculations built in?

Confluence isn't designed - at all - to have this sort of spreadsheet functionality, but it is designed to embed things that do, like an actual spreadsheet.

comments: author: Andrew Skinner
body: Thanks Rob, appreciate you coming back to me. I tried this and whilst it could work, it won't work for my scenario sorry. I would need to use this in a template style, so I would need to be able to incorporate the excel file into a template. To explain, we have a highly consumable recovery document (over 400) however, we manage the template for it. I've created a global template, which is linked via the scaffolding add-in to allow for greater agility.


author: Rob Woodgate
body: Hi Andrew,

Adding it to a template would have been my next suggestion, but clearly you've beaten me to it :smile:


author: Andrew Skinner
body: No problems, thanks again Rob from coming back and replying. I may be able to do this by third party vendor macro, but not ideal, as it may not change with the Confluence versions, one of many other concerns. Thanks again, back to the drawing board.


author: Andrew Skinner
body: Hi Matt,

Rob's solution below seems to be the most viable depending on your budget (Using a Spreadsheet function).

The Service Rocket Reporting macro / add-in may also offer this functionality, however is quite expensive and isn't guaranteed, so you could be up for not only the license cost, but some development / consultancy fees just to get the desired functionality.

I had gone so far to liaise with a third party vendor, Stiltsoft, who were cheap considering they were offering to develop their own solution, but my fear with them and that solution was it wouldn't stay within the Confluence life release cycle. Other issues and concerns were around if I modified the template design, it's likely the completeness review function would have only been limited to the original template, so any changes wouldn't be calculated

In Short, I had to pretty much walk away from this function i was after, I handed it over to my internal Confluence team as an operational request, a nice to have, but understand if it can't be completed type thing.


author: Matt G
body: Hi Andrew

I have a similar challenge. Did you find a solution?

Cheers

Matt