Hello:
One of the great things about Adagio Invoices is the lengthy descriptions available at the item level (10 lines x 75 characters). However one inconvenient thing is that the lines don't "word wrap" when your typing reaches the end of the line. That's not too bad when typing descriptions but a client needs to paste in lengthy descriptions from another document. If the text is a paragraph and you paste it, the first 75 characters are maintained and the rest is lost.

Questions:
-Other than copying/pasting in 75-character chunks, has anyone found a way around this situation?
-Does Softrak have any intention to change the behaviour to make Invoices work like the Notes sections in Customer/Vendors etc where word wrap does exist?
Thank you.

As you've discovered, it's really 10 lines of 75ch, rather than a word wrapping memo field like notes. I don't have a suggestion, but it could be a future option for Adagio Invoices. If word wrap were selected, the text block could be presented in a memo field and stored within that 750ch space or some new data field. Keep in mind that some users want text on certain lines for printing purposes.

Hi Bob:
Thanks for your comments. I think that anything requiring "some new data field" is likely to get nixed by R&D! But isn't the structure of separate fixed length fields similar to that of the Customer/Vendor Notes? Perhaps wrongly, I picture it as a variation on the control used to edit those Notes but with a restricted length of 10 lines (or whatever is defined on the Item).

Adagio Invoice text and notes are stored differently. The latter stores the text as 120ch chunks of data. Not as presented in the memo field. It's not restricted by 750 characters, but could be. You're probably right about it getting nixed. It would be difficult to switch.

Adagio Time&Billing supports the 'unlimited, text wrapping' descriptions as described above. I am not suggesting this as an alternative solution to Adagio Invoices, just that we have implemented it before. And it was a significant piece of work to get the designer to print the text appropriately, along with all the other information (such as codes and amounts) because they can be printed next to the text either on the first line of text or the last line.

I'm not in the positiion to nix anything, but it would be a significant data structural change to support the different way to save this text in batches and history, support importing invoices with this text, etc.

Check out how Time&Billing text works in the designer to see how that approach has been implemented.

Hi Bruce,

The problem is that "wrapped text" is difficult to line up and is almost alway proportionally spaced. MANY Invoice users what the text to line up in some way (hence the option to display the extended description text in a monospaced font).

We don't want to end up writing a word processor and this request comes up surprisingly infrequently - but it has come up before.

Thanks for letting us know it would be useful for your client.

Are the text descriptions that they are pasting unique for each invoice, or would common text blocks help alleviate the problem?

Andrew:
Yes, they are unique. We are using Invoices as a Work Order system. They receive a PO from their customer detailing the work to be done and they put that text onto the Work Order for the technician(s). Usually the content is short but there are some with more complex descriptions.

Perhaps a paste into the first line (or line x) could be mindful of the data length and spread it over subsequent lines. No change to the data structure would be required.

Bob:
Wouldn't that involve a call to Mr Bill Gates to ask him to change the way the Windows Paste function works? Or do you have another approach in mind?

Bill has moved on to more important issues. Likely, the paste function can be overriden. I just tried it and to my suprise a copy of multiple lines, pasted just fine into the text block. If the text has carriage returns, it does the right thing. If your text doesn't have carriage returns, it won't word wrap and gets truncated beyond 75ch.