Rich text attachments let you set up emails and form letters with the fonts, colours and content you want. Abio includes rich text attachments for requisitions, purchase orders, invoice, and quotes.
In one of our examples, we put together a special purchase order message for covid-19, with Bonnie Henry’s flag.
Let’s look at how we put together this rich text attachment. We’ll start by adding a new attachment. Abio won’t let you change an attachment once it’s been sent out to clients. The new attachment will start out blank. So, we’ll click in the rich text area and enter our new message. If we just type, it looks like this.
Aligning Text
The toolbar is showing us that this text is left aligned. You can either click anywhere in the line you want to centre, or you can select the whole paragraph, and then change the alignment to centred.
Changing Fonts
Next, we’ll use a different font for the company name. We highlight the name, and then select the font from the toolbar.
Changing Colours
There aren’t any font colours on the toolbar. To change the colour of text, select the text and right-click your mouse and select Properties.
On the second tab you can select a colour for the text.
We picked fuschia. I think you know where this is going…
Add an image
The logo button will let you select an image to include in your rich text attachment.
You can resize the image.
And now you have a special message, just for pride week. Select the attachment on one of your purchase orders.
And when you print it, it looks like this.
Including Fields From the Current Record
The critical information attachment is just a message, it doesn’t include fields from the record. When we email the purchase order, the email contains the company name, the purchase order number, the date issued, and our contact at that company.
This is because we set up a rich text attachment for emails, and referenced that attachment on our purchase order.
If we click on the description to the right of the field, Abio shows us what the email looks like for this record.
If we click on the label, it will take us to the attachment.
Normally we aren’t allowed to change attachments that have gone out to clients, because we want to maintain a record of what we’ve sent out. In this case, we can use the Z (unaudited change) action to make changes to this email attachment.
We’ve highlighted the part of the email where we reference the attached purchase order. We can change that to be more specific. Instead of
We’ll change the wording and position the cursor where we want to insert the purchase order number.
When we click the P/O button, Abio inserts a purchase order field.
Now, when we send out an email, the purchase order number will be in the body of the email.
Those are the basics of creating rich text attachments. The details will vary according to their use.