Rich Text Formatting in email notifications (and Update Requests)

Jörg Schmidt1

Hi,

unfortunately I heard from Andree that is still not possible to

format text in update requests or email notifications f.e. bold, italic, underlined as well as putting URL-links to certain words or make quotations.

I regret this because I find it a very important function and hope you will agree and find a solution.

Hope to hear from you, soon. Thank you.

kowal

It would be great to have some kind of Rich Text Formatting Inside Notifications.

I am using the Notifications a lot and sometimes I need to put the link to the Smartsheet Form inside... the link is long and does not look sexy at all.

Would be great to convert text in notifications into links.

SS in CO

Hyperlink cannot be included in a customized message in the Workflow. I am using Smartsheet to have people register for a simulcast. The workflow includes a message sent to the registrant but I am unable to have hyperlinks to calendar downloads included in the message.

MariaCurtis

I'm currently building out an "Ideas" page for our HR PMO. When testing, I realized email alerts cannot be formatted. Not even basic formatting like bolding text.

In the example below, I don't want to do much, but the ability to bold the field names would be helpful so the receiver of this email can quickly see what the field is, values they've submitted, and responses received on their idea.

I think it would be great to include the option to:

• Bold Text
• Underline Text
• Italicize Text
• Create Bulleted List
• Create Numbered List
• Change Font Color

Mike matthys

And the width of the notification would be nice to, now i got a email page thats is 80% white and 20 % notification

Would be nice to have it a little wider, like times 2 :) or a setting that you can change

Joerg Schmidt

Hi, I would appreciate if it is possible to mark email text in bold, underline or italic

Thank you

amhba

Here is a workaround, at least for bold text: Usehttps://boldtext.io/to convert plain text into Unicode. Type in what you want to convert in the top part, then copy the converted text from the bottom part, and use those unicode-converted values to identify columns in email alerts that are otherwise plain text.

Examples: ,

These are not formatted text, they are actually different characters altogether; if you copy-paste those into your sheet or alert, you should see them come through as looking like formatted text.

To provide field names in notifications, we use an "aggregator" column to group multiple columns into a single field, so you simply reference the Aggregator column instead of maintaining formatted column names in each notification (assuming you have more than one that goes out to people).

Assuming that your column names are Idea Title, Description, Status, Comments from PMO, and Submission date, the Status Aggregator column (column formula) would look like this: =(" : " + [Idea Title]@row + CHAR(10) + ": " + [Description]@row + CHAR(10) + ": " + [Status]@row + CHAR(10) + " : " + [Comments from PMO]@row + CHAR(10) + " : " + [Submission Date]@row + CHAR(10))

So your message would look something like this:

"Hi [Name],

Thank you for sharing your idea with us, the status of your request is below:

{{Status Aggregator}}"

That way you can maintain message contents in a single field without needing to go to your Automations if you want to make changes to the columns that are being presented to people.

You can, of course maintain those individually, so if you wanted to do that you would just put this in your notification messages:

: {{Idea Title}}

:{{描述}}

...etc.

You could run into issues if you have people using email clients that do not support Unicode; as unlikely as that may be nowadays, if that is an issue, people could just see rectangles or blank spaces instead of letters for the "formatted" text.

Pam Ferguson

It would be great to easily add a weblink in an automatic notification, without having to enter a long web address. Sometimes based on items that are entered, we must redirect users to another site, or one outside of Smartsheet (gasp, I know...), but it would be great to have a cleaner way to enter it.

A.J.

Currently, there is no way to bold or italicize in the email messages that go out as part of automations. Having the ability to change text color, highlight, and bold would be incredibly helpful for user adoption and to distinguish SmartSheet from competitors.

J.Naylor

I fully support this feature request! I'm also interested in the ability to format text within the message fields and provide links without seeing he long web address.

I recently encountered this scenario when I created a workflow as part of an event registration process. On the specified date, the workflow will send an update request to prompt the user to visit a website (lunch menu) to choose what they want to eat and then return to the update request form to submit their lunch request.

In the update request message field, I place the link on its own line. Outlook (and some other email services) may automatically create the hyperlink.

However, the the actual web form does not indicate that the text should be a link. I imagine that some recipients may skip the step to click the link in the email, but the web form doesn't indicate that the text is a link (though the user can copy link, paste into browser).