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Increase character limit on email automations

swilliams
swilliams ✭✭✭
edited 06/13/24 in Smartsheet Product Feedback & Ideas

It would be very helpful if you increased the character cap for emails sending from automations. Along with rich text formatting, my other submission, this would greatly improve our workflows by letting others draft and send emails that they'd normally have to send via mail merge.

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  • Riana
    Riana ✭✭

    Hope and believe all are well with in this new year of 2024.I have an issue that I am struggling with and that is the Animation workflow alert someone massage body that can only take 2000 characters per massage. Is there any way we can increase the number of characters per massage?

    Regards

    Riana

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  • Riana
    Riana ✭✭

    Good Day Swilliams

    Is this Idea being investigated as I have not received any feedback yet on this Idea. please do elaborate on the investigation?

    Regards

    Riana

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  • MaryMc
    MaryMc ✭✭

    We are beginning to use workflow to notify applicants of awards and need to provide some very specific information should they accept the award. We are having to be very creative in our writing to get out what we need within the character limits. An increase in character limits would greatly benefit us and likely others!

    Thank you!

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  • CAS the CSA
    CAS the CSA ✭✭✭

    For my clarification, has putting the desired body text into a cell and referencing the cell in the workflow text not resolved this? We've produced some fairly lengthy notifications this way but I haven't actually done a character count.

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  • CAS the CSA
    CAS the CSA ✭✭✭
    edited 07/12/24

    I just ran a test for you

    with this in the workflow body

    character count of column 1 : {{len 1}}

    text of column 1:

    {{body 1}}

    character count of column 2 : {{len 2}}

    text of column 2:

    {{body 2}}

    image.png

    I received this email, over 8000 characters

    image.png

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  • CAS the CSA
    CAS the CSA ✭✭✭
    edited 07/12/24

    whoops, forgot. this is what the relevant section of the spreadsheet looks like

    image.png

    essentially recreating a very rudimentary mail merge

    we put our body text in the cells in =" " and make them into column formulas

    then in our workflows we add {{ }} fields for columns that have unique data to the row

    if the specific data is also too large on the character count I make a helper column that merges all the data from the pertinent columns into one chunk

    I can't share what we actually put out but it looks a bit like…

    [SUBJECT LINE]

    {{subject helper column}} ie. ="[Project Name]@row+" "+"Update"

    [NOTIFICATION BODY TEXT]

    Good afternoon {{name column}},

    {{generic opening paragraph column}}

    ie. ="text1"

    column formula up to 4000 char

    {{specific merged data helper column}}

    ie. ="start date: "+ [start]@row+char(10)+"assigned to: "

    + [assigned]@row+char(10)+"due date: "+ [due]@row

    column formula I don't know the limit

    {{generic closing paragraph column}}

    ie. ="text2"

    column formula up to 4000 char

    thank you kindly,

    CAS the CSA

    we haven't had a notification too long to go out yet

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  • CAS the CSA
    CAS the CSA ✭✭✭

    @swilliams

    @MaryMc

    @Riana

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  • CAS the CSA
    CAS the CSA ✭✭✭

    After thought: If having the massive amount of body text in columns bogs down your main sheet I recommend putting in a trigger that, when a notification is due, copies the row to a dummy notifications sheet that has the additional x number of notification helper columns added at the end. I also recommend you write a workflow to auto delete those copied rows from the dummy sheet after they have aged for however long based on the new created date.

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  • sholmes
    sholmes ✭✭✭✭

    The limit of 2000 is not enough at all with that including spacing. With all the technology and good features, you say you have, there has got to be a quick way to increase this to help make this work for typical business needs?

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