Excellentable now features Universally Unique Identifiers

The last release of Excellentable (version 4.2.1.x), was a huge step for all of the Excellentables in Confluence made by over 600 customers, worldwide. We introduced UUID’s.

What is UUID?

UUIDs are universally unique identifiers. If you open a Confluence page with Excellentable in the Source editor (or right-click→ view source) you will be able to see the ID of the given Excellentable on your current Confluence page.
The ID is generated automatically and used as a numeric value usually in the 100’s or 1000’s for any Excellentables that were created prior to this latest release.

However, after the release of UUID’s, all newly created Excellentables will now have a 32 character alphanumeric code.

That’s it?

Remember the release of Excellentable 4.0, where the UI barely changed. Here we are, less than a year later, and we have a full version of Excellentable for Confluence Cloud. That’s right, Excellentable for Cloud is out of BETA! Excellentable also dons advanced features like Data Validation, Conditional Formatting, more responsive tables, HTML exports, improved collaborative editing, and many other updates.

UUIDs are unique to the point of absurdness. If a billion Excellentables are created every second from now until 2120, there is still only a UUID clash. Therefore, we have the framework to do the following in the near future.

Space Migration: This will allow the migration (and even merging) of spaces between each other and this will include support for any future hosting migrations an organization may experience. So if you wish to migrate from Atlassian Server/DC to Cloud or vice versa, you will be able to export and import Excellentables with a touch of a button. This may not sound big, but for admins of large confluence instances with thousands of pages and macros attached to those pages, it saves a lot of time and effort.
Referencing between Sheets: As of now, we are unable to link data between two Excellentables within the same instance. However, advanced UUID will allow us to link and reference data between other Excellentables within the same Confluence instances.
Security: The small numeric numbers, given to earlier Excellentables were easy to guess and therefore easy to exploit. For example in the above screenshot, the number 5269 is a 4 digit number, a determined hacker just needs to use the iterations from 0 to 10,000 to get to the desired Excellentable ID. UUID, with a 32 digit alphanumeric code will need close to 10^50 guesses, which strongly discourages brute-forcing and improves the security of your data while using Excellentable.

What else can we expect

At Addteq, we lead DevOps by example and strive to make excellentable better. These are the two features you can expect soon from Excellentable

Collaborative editing without external connections: Collaborative editing currently uses Addteq’s created service but it needs an external connection.

User Notifications: Get notified if changes are made to excellentable.

Graphs and Charts: With the data in spreadsheets you will be able to create native graphs right inside confluence without a need to switch to an external app.