Letter templates are the documents which VSys merges together with your people to produce letters. They are identical in concept to mail merge documents in Microsoft Word, where you write your letter and include merge fields which are then replaced with each person's data to create the individual letters.
Changing a letter template does not affect any letters which were created previously using that template.
Open the Letter Template Setup tool by clicking on Letter templates from the Letters panel on the main VSys One screen, or from within a project.
Tools
Add letter template |
Creates a new, blank template. |
Load built-in templates |
Brings up a list of the sample templates which are built-in to VSys One. These can act as a starting point for your own templates, and you can hide those which are not useful to you. |
Load from a file |
Loads a saved template from disk, usually one sent by another VSys user. |
Copy letters from elsewhere |
In the lower-left corner, this brings up a list of other projects (or globally, if you're working in a project now) which have one or more letter templates defined. Use this to copy a letter template from one project (or globally) to another. Select the source and one or more letters, then click on the Execute copy link. Once you've copied a template, changes made to the copy do not affect the original, nor do changes made to the original affect any copies. |
Setup letter types |
Brings up the Letter Types Setup tool. |
Right-click tools
Add letter template |
Creates a new, blank template. |
Copy |
Makes a copy of this letter template, which you can then edit. |
Edit |
Brings up the letter template editor, letting you modify the text, formatting, fields and properties of this letter template. |
Properties |
Opens the Letter Template Properties editor to define the detailed properties - name, type, data source, language, etc. - for this template. |
View |
Brings up the Letter Template Properties editor, but in read-only mode. |
Delete |
Deletes this letter template. Any existing letters based on this template are not changed or deleted. |
Load from a file |
Loads a saved template from disk, usually one sent by another VSys user. |
Save to a file |
Saves the selected template as an XML file. |
Letter templates created within a project are only accessible within that project, unless you copy them into another project later. This helps you organize your templates and not have dozens of "Thank-you" templates everywhere.