I’ve (finally) figured out that formatting is an important part of a wiki. Shockingly folks don’t appreciate reading giant walls of text, so understanding how to break up a page in a way that improves it’s usefulness is important. One way we do this is with headers.

Headers are useful in breaking up the page into discrete sections. I think of them like chapters in a book - they signal to the reader what is coming up, and let folks skip around to more interesting sections if they like.

A VERY common way to do this is simply by changing the size of the text, or by bolding it.

While this DOES make the text bigger and bolder, it can rob you of some interesting features built into knowledge systems.

Header Styles

Instead, use header styles, NOT font sizing, to break up pages into sections. Header styles will also break up the page with clear headers, but have a major advantage over bolding and font sizing - they interact with the tool in different ways.

In Confluence

Using header styles in Confluence lets you do some pretty cool things like:

1️⃣ - Automatically generate a table of contents - The Table of Contents (TOC) macro will generate a TOC based on headers on the page. Easy!

2️⃣ - Send a hyperlink directly to that specific header - each Header will have it's own link, letting you send folks directly to it.

3️⃣ - Easily standardize look and feel - Using header styles will ensure your headers always look the same between pages.

1. Click the text size drop down & select your size

2. Type it in!
   

In Google Docs

Header styles in Google Docs let you easily create a table of contents and link to headers

1. Select the header size

2. Type it in

3. Google automagically makes a table of contents