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Letter Templates

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. 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. From the main VSys One screen click on the Letters panel then Letter templates, or from the same panel within a project.

Linked Graphic

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.

Note: You can't use this link to open a Word or an RTF file, this is used for loading a file that was saved by another copy of VSys. To bring in a Word or RTF file, copy its contents to the clipboard in Word, then in the template editor, paste it into VSys. VSys will bring in as much of the layout, formatting and graphics as it can.

Copy letters from another project

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 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.

In This Section

Letter Template Editor

Sub-letters

Letter Template Properties

Alternate Language Variants

See Also

Setup Letter Types and Templates

Letter Types

Letter Reply (RSVP) Statuses

E-mail Attachments