Using Word to Create Custom-Formatted Emails in Laserfiche Workflow

CDI
1 hour ago
2 min read

By Kyle Knebel

June 2025 Consultants Corner

You may have already known that Laserfiche Workflow has an Email activity. You can format emails to be sent to many different recipients, with tokens that can be used in the body, subject, or addresses. However, the simple email activity editor doesn’t allow for any engaging and artistic formatting, unless you use HTML formatting. But that requires knowledge and skills that many of us do not have.

Along comes the “Update Word Document” activity to save the day! Tucked away in the Advanced properties of this activity is a checkbox called “Emit email token”. That little check box makes it super easy to create beautifully formatted emails with almost no effort.

This month’s article will show you how to apply some beauty to your emails using a Microsoft Word document, along with two activities in Laserfiche Workflow. Let’s take a look!

Step 1:

Create the MS Word template file. (It will be uploaded in Workflow, later.)

In this example, we’re going to feed some information to the Word document. This means we are going to use “Merge Fields” on our MS Word document. In the image below, you can see the four fields formatted to look prettier than just plain text or even HTML.

Open a MS Word document and create your template document. (Note: Headers/Footers will appear on your email, so don’t use them if you want a “cleaner” look.)
Next, we insert “Fields” under Quick Parts.
Edit the new field’s properties. It will need to be defined as a “MergeField”, then you’ll give it a custom name that you create. Repeat this step for all new fields that you want to add to the document.
Save the Word document so that it is ready to be uploaded to Workflow.

Step 2: Build your Workflow.

Add the “Update Word Document” activity in the appropriate location for your particular workflow.
Upload your beautiful MS Word document as a “Server attachment.”
Name the attachment file. The description is optional.
On the newly added document, you’ll click the “New…” button under the Modification area. This is where you will map the MergeFields.
Select “Simple Field Merge” as the Type.
Click the “Import field names from document” link.
Once the Field names appear, use the token selector to add the values to be mapped to the fields on the Word document.
Note: The values will come from previous activities in the workflow. It depends on the activity as to which values you will use.
Here’s what the completed activity will look like once configured:
Edit the Advanced properties of the Update Word Document activity to generate an email token.
1. Click the gear icon at top right.
2. Check the “Emit email token” box
Finally, add the Email activity to your workflow, then click “Email Editor…”
1. Scroll down to the Update Word Document activity, then select the “Email” option
2. Check the Apply Formatting option and type in “HTML”
Publish and then test your workflow to see how the email looks!