Proposal Description Formatting

This is something our company has struggled with and continues to struggle with. Basically, the only way to be sure of what your formatting is going to look like is to constantly have to save and print preview a draft of the report to see what it’s going to actually look like. I agree, it would be great if the formatting in the typable fields in Aspire actually reflected what they would look like when published on reports. We have several times accidentally sent out emails/proposals to customers with formatting problems unknowingly because of this flaw, but our salespeople have basically just learned that they always have to preview their proposals before sending to customers to minimize errors. 

Welcome! I use an HTML stripper like https://codebeautify.org/html-stripper. You can change your default font size in configuration if that’s often messing you up. always paste clean & then format. 

Thank you for the advice ​@cnugent.  Yes, we’re trying our best to get our salespeople into the habit of print previewing everything (even for the more basic issue of not sending things with a DRAFT watermark!).  The tough part is when the formatting isn’t working and it becomes impossible to fix without diving into the HTML code (most often <p> issues).  Simple to fix if you’re comfortable with HTML coding but very stressful for people who have been in the landscaping industry their entire career and are being asked to look at code for the first time!   If I could convince Aspire to fix one thing would be for Aspire to prevent the text editor from using any <p> tags at all… In the meantime, we will keep up our effort to diligently print preview everything!   Thanks again.     

And thank you ​@Kbaird!  Thank you for the suggestion on codebeautify.  Looks like a useful tool and I’ll definitely put it in my toolkit.  We do have the default font size set and continue to train with everyone on pasting clean in Aspire.  I also use https://html-cleaner.com/ a lot to make the code legible when I need to clean up something that has gone way off the rails.   I also have neat little extension on my browser (Edge) called ‘Find and Replace’ that does exactly that on web pages.  You can even set up a rule that will find all instances of <p> and </p> and get rid of them with one click.

One other question I had that you might be able to help with:  In the report editor, I believe that you HAVE to use an RTF field in order for the editor to render the HTML from the Description fields.  Am I correct in that assumption?  When I try to map an HTML description field to a basic text box or a table cell it always displays the full code and I can’t find anything to make a basic text box or table cell render the HTML.  Is that correct?   Thank you again!