Send beautiful emails from your Coda docs!

Hello everyone!

We wanted to announce few new capabilities that are now available as part of the SendEmail action. You can now send rich content (a section, or bulleted list etc) in an email in addition to sending out simple text emails.

Here is an example that emails a column that has rich content inside it.

And here is another example that emails out a weekly timesheet. This example uses the Clocking In a Time Clock + Gmail template from our template gallery

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Please try it out and send us your feedback. We hope you will like this feature as much as we enjoyed building it!

Thanks
Himanshu

15 Likes

Hello! can you link to some tutorials/help articles about the basics of the send email function? Still having trouble navigating the help section. Would love to try this feature out!

Hi Katherine

SendEmail action is an action that is available as part of the packs. You can find more details about it here.

Also, here is a gif that shows how to set it up in a blank document from scratch.

Thanks
Himanshu

2 Likes

This is fantastic! Does the same ability to send canvases via email work with the new Layouts feature? I am building a tracker for auditions for a music group. I would love to build a layout that is populated using row data for each auditionee (scores, comments, etc.) and then use the SendEmail action to send them that rich, beautiful layout with their results.

Thanks for all you folks do!

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@Andrew_Zweibel Currently no, it sends the entire canvas in the section. We’re working on it though!

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Hey there. Rich text and line breaks doesn’t work on a Format column. I really really really need this feature in about one week, I have a critical marketing strategy using this feature and it seems that there are no workaround.

Could you please try to find a fix to enable rich text in a column that has the Format formula in and is looking to another column?

Thanks!!

Hi, if you refer to a text in a column, Coda supports almost all HTML formatting, so an easy workaround is to create an email in any email client (easiest is GSuite/Google) and then the formatted email you can copy and paste into the cell of your coda sheet. If copying it directly from your email client doesn’t work, try sending the formatted email to your own account (as HTML email) and then copy the content and paste into Coda.

Also, consider the following formatting that works directly in the Coda cells:

  • Bold - Ctr+B, Italic - Ctr+I, Underline - Ctr+U
  • To start a new paragraph (hard return) use “ALT+Enter”
  • To start a new line in a paragraph (soft return) use “Shift+Enter”
  • Insert a bullet by starting a new line with as simple hyphen “-” followed by space. It will magically turn into bullet
  • If you want a sub-bullet, just start a new line with normal bullet and use “tab”
  • To insert non-breaking space type “ALT+0160”
  • To insert a non-breaking space type “ALT+0173”
  • To insert a non-breaking n-dash type “ALT+0150”
  • To insert a non-breaking m-dash type “ALT+151”
  • To insert a ® (Registered Mark) type “Alt+0174”
  • To insert © (Copyright) type “Alt+0169”
  • To insert ™ (Trade Mark) type “Alt+0153”
  • To insert € (Euro) sign type “Alt+0128”
  • To insert ÂŁ (Pound) sign type “Alt+0163”

I hope this helps, if I got you right.

Hey @Stefan_Stoyanov and thanks for you answers.

Actually my use case is not related to your solution.
I already know how to format text in a conventional cell.

My problem is that I’m using the formula Format to make text templates and filled them with other columns data.

To be more clear, I have two tables :

  • One that have a Role select list (which refers to what kind of client I will send the text), and another with a text template with some {} in it, in order to customise mail content. Each role have a different text in it.
  • The second table is my sender table : I have a lookup column for role, that’ll insert the text template in a column for this row, and a few other columns that have data that are inserted in the Final Text column in place of the {} with the help of the Format formula.

My problem is that rich text is not enabled while using format formula.
If my initial text has some rich text in it, this rich text will not be used in my Formatted text.
Because of that, the mail I’m sending will be only a block of text which is not cool.

I think this should be resolved because my use of mail templates with the Gmail pack can be extremely powerful, and I would like to use Coda for this instead of other tools.

1 Like

If you want more control over styling, check out my post here: Gmail Pack HTML Email Builder

You can use HTML tags in the content column and it’s a full HTML email that’s configurable. I think for your Format() code you could include the HTML tags for any rich text content as well.

1 Like

Thanks! It’s a very interesting way to send mail via Coda, but in my case, the content are different for each roles. And with your solution, you send a text block from the email builder. That would mean different text blocks and tables for each roles.
I’ll think of how to adapt your solution to my use case.
Anyway, there is a need for rich text in Format formula.

Yes, i have the same problem.

Any solution for this problem?

e.g. in the content are in send mail, i am using formula’s to send certain variables in the mail.

Here, there is an issue in formatting.

e.g. can anyone tell me how to enter a new line.

=XXXX.XXX + “random text” + xxx.xxx +“random text in new line”

I want the second text in new line. How to do it?

Also, how does the results column work?

I added some individualization to the Email Builder. There is a second document linked in the post that allows you to individualize the name and team, but this can be customized to whatever you need it to be. Not sure if the strategy I used will work for your use case or not, but it might be worth checking out…

(It’s the “Mailing List” template in that post.)

2 Likes

Thanks @benblee!
I finally managed to use your tables to do what I needed to do.
It would be great if one day we could have the same result without using html code. As I’m really not used to and I don’t want to :grin:
So thank you very much for the hard work you made for this template!!!

Thanks for giving it a try!

I’m glad it worked out!

Only word of caution is to watch the number of emails you’re sending because there are Gmail limits (something like 500 per day???). Coda isn’t operating as an email service, it’s sending emails directly from your Gmail account. If your list is dozens to a hundred or so, you’re fine, but if you’re in the several hundred or thousands range, you might still want to look at an actual email service.

Hi Tom

I completely agree. The formulas today do not work well with formatted content. We are working on making this better and should have the initial support out soon.

Thanks
Himanshu

5 Likes

Hi Everyone

I wanted to give a quick update. We have rolled out support for preserving the original formatting when using the format formula. You can try it out in the following document.

Thanks
Himanshu

9 Likes

Awesome, thanks! I can’t wait to try this!

Hey

I only seem to be able to receive the “beautiful emails” in Gmail. Sending them to my Outlook from Coda via Gmail integrationg and the formatting is pretty poor. Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance!