Searching on confluence whiteboard

[Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager]

Hi there,

I am using ctrl-F in Chrome when on my whiteboard. I am searching for words that are present on my whiteboard, however, it does not return any results. Is this a known issue or is it something I am doing wrong?

We were hoping to create a searchable mindmap, but I am not sure it will work without being able to search it.

[Christina Ristevski]

Hey @Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager unfortunately searching content on a whiteboard isn't yet possible. I can totally understand your use case though. We definitely want to bring this capability to the product in the feature 🙏

[Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager]

Hi Christina,

Many thanks for your reply.

Will there be the option to request features at some point? Will this be on the roadmap?

[Christina Ristevski]

@Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager what other features would you like to request? This is definitely on our roadmap, however likely won't land for a couple of months. 

[andy.johnston]

Hey @Christina Ristevski - just following up on this to see if there's a timeline set for this feature.  We've a large team of 55 working on Pi planning and I didn't realise you couldn't search for text before we kicked off the process.... now I'm going to be stuck doing a lot of manual searching to match things up.

[Emre Parkan]

Is there any roadmap item for search, it is super frustrating to use whiteboard @Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager @Christina Ristevski 

[Brecht Seys]

@Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager can't answer to your question in the comments below, so replying to your original question.

I have an overflow menu (...) at the top right corner of my Confluence Whiteboard. In that menu I have a "Give feedback" option, where you can post feature requests and bugs via chat.

I've started communication about a handful of topics so far, but only 1 has received a reply, so not sure how actively it's tracked.
For other Atlassian products, there's public backlogs / forums with defects and feature requests, which sometimes stay open for years even though they get lots of votes, so not getting my hopes up.

[Stevie Musk - Service Assurance Manager]

Thanks Brecht, i shall do this!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this post and comments. Definately will be helpful to search text on a whiteboard, esp large ones

[Peter Means]

One possible workaround that worked for me: export to PDF and try searching in the PDF

UPDATE: I was wrong, this isn't working for me after all. Certain pieces of text are selectable and searchable, but most of it is not (Using Preview on MacOS)

[Ethan Daniel Helliwell]

This did not work for me, maybe they didn't like that we found a workaround lol

[andy.johnston]

I found that the export to PDF is the same as a JPG export, it's an image export?  Maybe if you ran it through Ai to convert it... but what a messy way to deal with it.

Exporting to PDF the links to the Jira issues don't even work... this would be another absolutely mandatory requirement in my mind. (eg when I export from Lucid charts to PDF the links work!!)

[Mykhail Mironov]

I wanted to do the same, but when exporting the Whiteboard to PDF, it saves the entire board as a single image without any selectable text. Could you please share how you managed to make it work?

[Peter Means]

Sincere apologies, I was wrong about this. I'm not sure why but at this point I can't reproduce this workaround. The whiteboard I'm working with is mostly sticky notes, and some of the text on them is selectable, but none of it appears to be searchable.

[Peter Means]

Did some more testing and apparently I was wrong again, some of the text actually is searchable, but not all of it. Of curse this is still not helpful, but I think this is why I originally thought it was a viable workaround; my initial testing just happened to be some of the text that was searchable.

[Pierre Leroux]

Hey hey all! Vote for the feature here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-78269

The more votes, the more chances this feature to be developed soon.