Sending Emails With Spreadsheet Data and Charts In Velixo 6

Introduced two years ago with Velixo Reports 4.0, the Report Distribution feature of Velixo has been met with acclaim from our customers. For many of them, it is almost like a magical “Do everything for me” button that turns long and repetitive tasks into a single click.

The mythical “Do Everything!” button – an original idea of Mike C, Acumatica’s CTO

While our users have been enjoying the benefits of this feature (sipping cocktails or having the afternoon tea while the application is hard at work) the Velixo team has been busy making Report Distribution even better for you!

Supercharging Report Distribution is one of the key themes in the Velixo 6 release, and during our last webinar, Pavel introduced you to Report Blueprints. He also shared an in-depth blog post with our users and recorded a video tutorial, explaining how you can dynamically generate multiple sheets from a single template.

Just as we were wrapping up the development of Velixo 6, Fred Reiter, a Velixo user and IT Director at Scott Fetzer Consumer Brands, reached out to us with an interesting question:

Is it possible or is there a format for the Email Body field that will allow me to include a Range from a specific sheet? The daily report that we currently send out has a “summary” that is sent in the body of the email and the workbook is attached. The distribution list function is awesome for creating the file and/or helping generate the email, but I cannot seem to find a way to cut and paste the range into the body of the email or maybe have syntax that will allow me to utilize the Range in the email body.

This got us thinking, and within a few days we had a solution ready for Fred!

How to send an e-mail with a range of cells in the mail body using Excel and Velixo

It’s easy! From your distribution list, you simply need to enter the range that you want to include in the Email Body column:

To differentiate between regular text and Excel ranges, you have to put hash/pound (#) sign in front of the range. You can also use named ranges, like this:

Voilà! That’s it! Here’s how it looks:

The cell ranges and charts are converted to HTML by Excel and included in the e-mail body by Velixo Reports during report distribution.

You will usually attach a spreadsheet or PDF export to messages that you send from Excel, but if the email body already contains everything you need you can set the format to “None” in the first column of your distribution list:

Note: if you created your distribution list before installing Velixo 6, you will not see this option; you can add it to the validation list or simply create a new distribution list and copy-paste the contents of your older list in the new list if needed.

Additional Reading

Distribution List documentation

Using a cell or range reference for the Email Body in a Distribution List

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Fred Reiter, IT Director at Scott Fetzer Consumer Brands for this wonderful idea.