ET211 Correspondence

Contents

0. Overview
1. Menu
2. Toolbar
3. Entry Fields
4. Operations
5. Today's Message
6. Text Searching
7. Spell Checking
8. Any Labels
9. Mailing List
10. System Codes

0. Overview

This program puts together all letters your company has sent and provides fast queries by dates, receiving companies, recipients or authors.

Two document formats are available: letter and fax. Both formats can be printed out as paper documents or transmitted to fax machines. You can choose a font (including typeface, size and color) for the text of a correspondence. If your computer is connected to the Internet, correspondences can be sent as e-mails. Recipients' information such as names, addresses, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.,  can be retrieved from customer and supplier files.

You can produce address labels and letters for direct mails. Signatures and images can be appended to letters and faxes. File attachments can be added to e-mails. 

If you have Microsoft Word installed, you can perform spell checking on the text. You can also use text words to search for relevant correspondence.

Since you can open and save text files, this program can function as a simplified text editor.

1. Menu

Open

• Open an External File...
  Opens a text file and displays its content in Text field.
• Save Text As...
  Saves the content of the text field as a text file. 

Option

• By Date
• By To Party (Addressee)
• By From Party (Author)
• By Attention
• By Reference No.
  Selects the field by which data are ordered. The selection changes if you change the data-ordered-by radio buttons in the Search for a Mail dialog box after clicking the Search button in toolbar.
• Hide Letterhead
  Hides letterheads.
• Print Fax Number
  Prints fax numbers in the header section of a fax. (This would make the number readily available when you actually need to fax the document via a fax machine.) The default setting is not to print. Use system code MAIL-GENRE (5th character) to override.
• Negate Find Filter
  Negates the filter criteria. That is, instead of selecting, you unselect the filtered data. 
• Signature
  Show Signature Block: Shows company name and horizontal bar beneath text.
  Show Signature: Shows signature, if a signature image is available.
  Show Authorized Signature: Shows the name in From field beneath the bar.
• Lock Update/Delete
  Set password on ET211W to enable this function.

Label

Set sizes for address labels here. Values can be pre-defined in system code DM-LABEL. Refer to system codes for details.

Reset parameters Up to 5 sets of parameters can be pre-defined and selected. For example, select 1 for customer labels, 2 for supplier labels, 3 for customer labels with a different font, etc. Left margin Distance from the left edge of printable area to the left edge of the leftest label. Top margin Distance from the top edge of printable area to the top edge of the first label. Label width Horizontal distance from the left edge of a label to that of the next label. Label height Vertical distance from the top edge of a label to that of a label below. Label spacing Distance of the blank space between 2 labels. Labels per column Number of labels per column on a page. Labels per row Number of labels per row on a page. Label Font To choose a font (typeface, size, color) to print labels. When printing individual envelopes, set labels per row and labels per column both to 1. Set top margin and left margin based on the position you wish to print address. Label width and label height set the maximum area inside of which an address can be printed. Top margin + label height should not exceed envelope or page length. Left margin + label height should not exceed envelope or page width.

Font

• Header...
  A document is divided into header and text. Select font for the header here. Font size is not effective, while color is.
• Text...
  Select font typeface, size and color for text. Text in new font will be displayed after selection. While color selection seems not effective, it does during actual printing.

2. Toolbar

	To print faxes, letters, customer address labels, supplier address labels and any labels. See Any Labels section for details on any labels.
	Key word search. (Not implemented yet.)
	To retrieve excerpts.
	To print direct mails to customers.
	To print direct mails to suppliers.
	To send e-mails. Sends a single mail or sends to all members on a mailing list.
	Text search. To retrieve correspondence that contains matching word.
	Finds the next match in a retrieved text.
	Spell checking on text.

3. Entry Fields

4. Operations

Click or in the toolbar to select a customer or a supplier. Related data for the recipient will be shown in the To, Attn, Fax, Address, and E-Mail fields. Choose a suitable company in the upper-right drop down list, which will determine the letterhead to use. After satisfactory entry, press Insert key to save data. You can then print, fax or e-mail the content. To print or send an existing correspondence, retrieve it first.  After you find a previous letter, you can also print or mail it.

in the toolbar lets you print a letter, a fax, address labels and any labels. The following dialog box shows if letter of fax is selected. 

If you had characters of languages other than English (e.g., Chinese or Japanese), you would need to select the right font to print correctly. Check Append Images in Key Words to have images printed right below text.  Images are specified in the Key Words field as a string of item numbers or image file names, depending on the state of As Item No. checkbox.

Before printing, you can select the Setting->Font menu item to change printing font, size and color.

When printing address labels, you can select customers or suppliers in serial (batch) or individual mode. For the former mode, provide a range and filter to retrieve the desired customers or suppliers, as shown in the following dialog box:

Refer to Product Data Retrieval for a detailed description for the use of this kind of dialog box. Show Customer No. means to print customer numbers besides customer names. Show Contact, show phone number and show ZIP code are all self-explanatory. Copies for Each Customer means the copies needed for each customer.

There may be many labels on a piece of A4 paper. If you are using a paper with some labels already used, you can print from a label other than the beginning one by specifying the beginning row and beginning column. 

For individual mode, click the Individual tab:

Enter a customer number and contact name directly or use the Browse button to retrieve the data. Click the Add button to put the number into the list box on the left. Continue until you are done with all customers. To delete a customer, select the customer and click the Remove button or double-click the customer.

To retrieve an existing correspondence, click the button in toolbar:

The data are ordered in 5 ways (index keys). Select a key and enter a relevant value in Key field. (For example, enter a date if Date order is picked or enter a customer name if To party order is picked.) Clicking the Next button will have some 50 records shown, beginning with the specified key value. Double-click on a record to retrieve that correspondence.

To print direct mails, click in the toolbar and the following dialog box appears:

Specify a data range and add filter if any. Click the Search button to retrieve and put customers data in the list box. You may repeat this search process several times for different ranges. To remove possible duplicates, click Remove Duplicates button. To delete the whole list, click Clear button. If you want to add company name and signature after text, check the Signature menu item under Setting menu. 

After you saved or retrieved a correspondence, you can mail it electronically. Making sure that you have an Internet connection, click the button and select Send an E-mail:

The recipient, mail address, subject and sender name are all data copies from the main window. SMTP server, domain name and sender ID are defined in system codes MAIL-SMTP, MAIL-SITE and MAIL-ID (see below). Use the Attachment button to add attachment files. To delete an attachment, double-click on the file name.

The mail software your recipient uses may not be able to wrap lines. In case of such complaints, check Use line mode for text. The text at the recipient side will be line-wrapped as shown on your screen.

If you are sending mails from a traditional Chinese Windows (Big5) environment to a simplified Chinese Windows (GB) environment, select Big5->GB in Conversion will convert the Chinese characters in text so that the sent message will display correctly in the recipient's language. Select GB->Big5 for opposite direction. If no Chinese characters are involved or conversion is not necessary, select None.

5. Today's Message

As soon as you launch ET6.1, you may see a bulletin board like the one shown above. You can arrange for bulletins to be displayed on set days so that users of ET6.1 will receive specific messages on specific days.

Messages are arranged as follows: In the Correspondence program, enter "ET61" in the To field, the appearing date in the Date field and the message in the Text field. 

You can also enter and modify today's messages in Etmenu.

6. Text Searching

You can use a string, a word or part of a word to search for text containing matches. Click to enter the Text Search dialog box:

Specify a proper search range based on the selected range nature. If Match Case is not checked, cases of words and text will not affect searching results. Otherwise, exact matches will be used.

Click OK to start searching. Records with matching characters will be shown in the list box of the Related Records dialog box, which overlays just below the toolbar of the main window. The word to the right of the hyphen in the title bar (foundation in this case) is the word used for searching. Clicking a record would show its content in the Text field, with the first matching word highlighted. 

To locate a second matching or after, click . To change text, select another record in the list box. To close the search session, close the Related Records dialog box.

7. Spell Checking

If Microsoft Word was installed on your computer, you can check spelling of text. Retrieve the text and click on the toolbar. Checking will proceed paragraph by paragraph. A paragraph will be skipped if no errors are found. The following dialog box appears when errors are encountered.

Text in Not in Dictionary is a paragraph from the original text. The word in red is where an error occurs. Suggestions contains suggested words. Click Ignore to ignore the current error. Click Ignore All to not check this error any longer. If this misspelled word is actually a proper word not defined in the dictionary, you can click Add to add it to the dictionary. The next time you do spell checking, this word will not be treated as an error.

Select a word from Suggestions list box and click Change to replace the misspelled word. Click Change All to change all occurrences of this error for the whole text. Use AutoCorrect to create a Word AutoCorrect word table.

Spell checking requires Word automation to function.  A few more seconds are spent to load the component the first time the checking function is used.

8. Any Labels

Any labels lets you print the same content on a great number of labels. The following is an example on a single label:

Label contents may include text, graphs and images. The syntax is the same as that for shipping marks. To print such labels, set label size and choose font type, style, color and size (by way of Label menu). Next, enter text along with graph and image scripts in the Text field. The following is the script for the above example:

<<0,0,65,15,S;27,3,35,15,O:TORUS.gif>>
  Hello

After selecting Any Labels menu item, enter the copies needed: 

Just enter the number of labels you need. Printing starts from the first label at the upper-left corner. You can print multiple labels on a page, as exemplified in the example.

9. Mailing List

Mailing list is a collection of e-mail addresses; it makes delivery of e-mails to each member of the list an easy task. Mailing list is also the generic name for server software that stores addresses and deliver mails. With such a server on your mail server, you get much better performance in sending a large quantity of mails. Currently, the adoption of mail servers is not common and mailing lists may not be financially and operationally justified. Besides, most mailing lists cannot integrate with ET6.1 and would seem cumbersome. Here we provide a client mailing list that is easier to use.

You can create as many mailing lists as you like, and save each list as a text file. The following dialog box has an address list that can be saved as promote.txt using the Save As button. In the future, if you want to send mails to people on the list, use the Open button to open promote.txt and retrieve the address list. By clicking OK you will send the content text on the main window to each one on the list.

Use Delete and Add buttons to delete or add addresses. Save lists again after modification. You can add addresses in a list individually here. Or in the main window, key in addresses in the Text field, one address a line. After all addresses have been keyed in, use File->Save Text As menu item to save the content to a text file, which can be opened here. Thirdly, the mailing list function in Customer Data Entry can help create lists that can be used here. One good way to verify that mails have been sent, you can append your own address to the end of each list.

The Setting tab shows fields that should already be set in Send an E-Mail.

The list box showed above can contain approximately 64,000 characters. Given an average length of 30 characters per address, one list may contain up to 2000 addresses. We have not tried to send to 2000 addresses before. Our suggestion is not to use large lists. Furthermore, it is customary not to attach files when dealing with mailing lists.

10. System Codes

Last modified: July 2002