Create/Edit Letter

This is the screen used to create or edit a letter document in the customer's Documents records. See Concepts|Documents for background. As discussed there, you can either generate a letter from a template, or upload any file.

First let's look at the screen shot for a new letter:

The fields are as follows:
Start Time - the date on which the entry was created - defaults to today
Description - any pertinent description
Status - this can be In Progress, Completed, or Finalised.  In Progress implies that you are still working on this; Completed implies that you have finished - but the entry can still be editied; and Finalised means that it is really complete and can no longer be edited.
Printed - this box will be checked when the letter has been printed
Template - if you want to generate the letter from a template, enter the template here - these are the document templates that are of Type 'Customer Letter' - the generated document will be an editable word processing file
Document - if you want to simply upload a file as a letter, press the Select button. A document select window will open allowing you to select the required file.  If you upload a word processing file (rather than say a pdf or scanned image of a letter) then you will be able to edit it if needed.

Now the edit screen. The senario is as follows: you created an editable letter as above.  Then you decided that you needed to modify it, so on the Customers|Documents screen, you selected the letter and then clicked on the actual letter to download it and open it in your word processor. You then saved a copy (as say Survey Letter-2), edited in the required changes and then saved it.

On the Customers|Documents screen you now press the Edit button to get the Edit Letter screen. You then press the Document Select button - this will open a browse window to allow you to select your 'Survey Letter-2' and upload it. The screen will then appear as below. The initial version has been saved as the previous version, and your new one as the new current version.

As intimated above, the Versions tab shows the previous versions. Note that you can use the Add button to add another, but you can also use the Select button.  If you use the Select button to attach another file, then the previous 'top' version will just be pushed onto the version list.

Parameters

If a template containing parameters is selected (i.e. Fill-In fields in Microsoft Word, or Input Fields in OpenOffice Writer), a window will be displayed prompting for the values of those parameters. On OK, these will be merged with the document.