Why Can’t I Email Word Templates or The Story of How I got Word Templates to Email

This is a story about when e-mailing Word Templates didn’t work!

The Report Writer Part

We love using Report Writer in Microsoft Dynamics GP!  It is such an easy to use, user-friendly program.  So when we clicked the Modify button, we were prepared for the wonderful experience of prettying up our new document.  We moved fields, changed fonts, added logos and created calculated fields.  We may have even attempted function scripts, and added tables or extra headers or footers.

When that report was done, the sense of satisfaction we felt having conquered the almighty Report Writer was beyond belief!

The report was AWESOME!  The accounting staff were happy, the boss was happy and life was good…

The Word Template Part

Then they wanted a Word Template.  How hard could that have been?  Doesn’t Report Writer feed the Word template?  We just based the template on the AWESOME Report Writer report… and… where had my AWESOME modified report gone?  The new Word template looked eerily like the out-of-the box report WITH NO MODIFICATIONS!  Well – at least they graciously gave us all of our calculated fields and we only had to re-modify the whole report again.

We reformatted the report.  We were very careful not to touch the littles, not to type between the tables, and we even gingerly removed the blue shading from the headers and footers without wiping out the entire report (several attempts and we got that to work!) and we were done!  Then our report was not only AWESOME but BEAUTIFUL too!

The E-mail Part

So then those BEAUTIFUL reports needed to be e-mailed!  We clicked all the right boxes, added the emails in the CORRECT email field, entered our transactions and clicked the print button – and watching the processing message was very encouraging – but our test was supposed to show up in our e-mail IN-box …. So we clicked print again …. and again …. and again ….  but email just wouldn’t work!

At that moment I felt like Charlie Brown with his Christmas Tree!

The Discovery Part

There was one header and one footer in each of the SOP Blank invoices and the POP Purchase Order Blank form that can’t be modified!  We needed to compare the headers and footers in the modified Report Writer report with the original out-of-the box report.  So we prepared to take screenshots, export our packages, check out the out-of-the box reports, – and then re-import them and fix them!

The moral of the story: If your reports don’t email, check these headers and footers EVEN IF YOU DON’T THINK YOU HAVE CHANGED THEM.

(We were sure we didn’t change them!)

Now you can e-mail your AWESOME, BEAUTIFUL documents!  Congratulations!  You did it!