Announcing Rich Text Activities & Emails

With almost 300 votes from across our user base, the ability to add rich-text editing & formatting to your emails, work logs and notes composed in Accelo is easily the most requested feature we’ve seen.

As such, it’s a huge relief to announce that rich-text formatting tools - similar to what you get in a word processor - are today available for all!

The next time you create an activity, or a reply, you’ll notice the new A button just to the right of the Save/Send button - click this to open the formatting bar which contains a number of handy options.

How rich can you go?

To echo the screenshot above: Rich. But not in a ridiculous manner. The text formatting options are a standard set, including numbered lists and bullet points, plus:

• Make text go bold,
• Switch to italics,
• Underline those keywords,
• and even play around with the text color.

Creating headings and sub-headings is also a breeze, as well as inserting hyperlinks and aligning text to the left, center, or right of the page. And of course there’s a handy button to “Clear Formatting” so you can quickly erase all the rich formatting if you change your mind - or perhaps you have copy-pasted content from Microsoft Word, or the internet, and want to strip out the formatting that came with it.

Besides the formatting bar, you can also select any text in a window and right-click to get a special little menu for quickly inserting a link, image, viewing a source code (for HTML-savvy users only) and even insert tables.

Inline Images!

Yes, you can now include images in the body of your activities, rather than just as attachments. There are 2 easy ways to do this:

1. Drag and drop an image from your computer into the body area of the activity window, and you’ll see it appear right there in the activity content. You can then re-size it or even use the formatting toolbar to re-align it.
2. Right-click in the body area and select the “Image” option. The advantage of this method is you can enter the URL of an image on the internet to be included in-line, though you can also search for a file on your computer to upload and show in-line.

If you're wondering whether you can still drag a non-image attachment into the activity - you can! There's a separate drop-zone at the bottom of the window to have the file included as a regular attachment. Either way, these images are still treated as normal attachments in Accelo - meaning they will be stored as attachments under the relevant client/project/etc which the activity was for.

Where can I use rich-text?

Almost everywhere you can log time, notes, or emails in Accelo, you will find the formatting option. This includes places where you're:

• Creating a brand new note, email, meeting or even logging a call.
• Editing an activity.
• Logging Time including the Daily and Weekly Timesheet screens.
• Replying - such as in the Request queue, Inbox screen, in-line on activity streams, and more.
• Entering meeting reports.
• Sending Quotes and Invoices - the templated text supports rich content (launching late January).
• Configuring an activity alert/template that occurs in a status progression.
• Drafting/sending a client Sign-off (launching late January).

Similarly, viewing the rich content version of an activity is now possible in many places, though we’ve tried to be smart about when to show the simpler plain-text version and when to display the full rich version. E.g. if you’re viewing the Stream for a client, the compressed view won’t be rich (since there's only one row of text we show), but once you click to expand an activity we will display the nice, rich version. Other places, such as the Daily Timesheet, only show a snippet of an activity’s body and as such will only ever reveal the plain version. Rich content is also not available in the Client Portal - yet ;-)

If you’re viewing an activity that was created “richly” with headings, bullet points and so on, but instead you see dashes for headings, asterisks for bullets and other styles missing, then you’ve stumbled upon one of the places where the rich display isn’t supported - yet. The “List Activities” screen is one such place we’re yet to upgrade.

What about rich emails captured into Accelo?

We'll be moving onto supporting the incoming emails in HTML format too in the coming months; there's a bit of extra work associated with doing this properly and securely, and we wanted to make sure you could benefit from writing rich text activities to clients without waiting to read them in too.

What about task descriptions, ticket descriptions, and more?

Getting the Rich Text formatting options into the creation activities is just the first (big) step in making many more places in Accelo Rich Text friendly. In the future, you'll be able to use Rich Text in the "body" or multi-line content for Milestone and Task Descriptions, Ticket Descriptions, Company Comments fields and many more places.

If you have any questions or concerns please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]