This article describes how admins can allow agents to add bolding, italics, lists, and other formatting, as well as images, to their ticket comments and macros by enabling formatting options. Formatting can help make tickets and the email notifications that are sent to requesters easier to read and understand.
Formatting options in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
This description applies to accounts that have the Zendesk Agent Workspace. If you don't have the agent workspace enabled, see Formatting options in the standard agent interface. The formatting options described in this section are available automatically in the agent workspace and are applied to your whole account.
When you enable the Zendesk Agent Workspace, your agents have a combination of formatting options within the same rich content editor, CKEditor. With CKEditor, your agents can enter Markdown commands to format text, or they can use the toolbar to format, all within the same editor.
Agents can format from the toolbar:
Agents can also enter Markdown commands:
This new editor is available to agents when they create new tickets, add ticket comments, make bulk editing changes to tickets, and update Facebook Messenger and Twitter Direct Message (DM) tickets created from integrations that use the Zendesk Channel Framework.
Formatting options in the standard agent interface
- Rich content (recommended): Agents can use a formatting toolbar to add images, links, formatting, and styling to ticket comments and macros. Agents can see instantly how their content looks as they make changes. Rich content is available in ticket comments and macros.
- Markdown: Agents can use Markdown syntax. Agents have to click Preview to see how their content will look. Markdown is available in ticket comments, macros, and signatures.
- In Admin Center, click the Objects and rules
icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings. - In the Comments section, select either Rich content
(recommended) or Markdown.
For information about rich content, see the Rich text formatting options reference. For information about markdown, see Formatting text with Markdown.
- Click Save tab.
41 Comments
Hi All! May I ask what this new Rich Editor means for markdown in agent signatures? Now older replies have the old formatting as regular text and it looks terrible. We would love to switch over but will miss our custom signatures with links and images terribly.
Hi Chris,
Old replies should still be displaying properly - are you seeing Markdown characters in old replies? If so do you have a ticket example?
Once you turn on the rich text editor we will process any Markdown you have (in signatures or macros) before applying text to the ticket. We're running it through a converter so that the Markdown is translated to HTML.
Has the processing stopped on this, as it's been listed at 50% for more than 24 hours. I keep checking my ticket settings and then coming back here to see the progress, but it has said "We are currently at 50% of all accounts as of October 6th." for more than 24 hours.....
Hi Jason,
We're actually at 70% as of yesterday afternoon, we forgot to update this article after increasing the number. We're continuing to rollout so we'll probably increase that number again this afternoon or tomorrow. Thanks for hanging in there!
Are we able to embed images in the ticket update. Like with Mark down we use![]()
to embed images where ever we need.
with rich text what option do I have to use ?
I can attach and that works fine.
Hi Ravi,
With the rich content editor you can drag and drop images directly into the comment field. When you start to drag in a file from your desktop you should see guides appear in the Zendesk tab that let you know where to drop the file depending on if you want to attach it or add it inline.
I have "formatting options for agents" enabled (via Settings>Tickets) but when I send an email, it still appears in the requester's inbox as plain text (links not included and italics appear like _this_ rather than in actual italics). Any idea as to why this might be occurring and how it can be remedied? Thanks
We have the same problem like Hani.
We have enabled the Rich Content Texteditor and if we use any formattings of the editor, it will be showed as plain text in e-mail notifications.
For example if you have a bold text, it will be showed *bold* in the email.
Tables looking terribly.
How can this be solved?
Hey, Hani and Oliver! I'm really sorry for taking so long to respond.
The most common culprit in these situations is that the wrong placeholder is being used. You'll want to make sure that you're using ticket.latest_public_comment_formatted in the Email Body section of your notification triggers. If you're using any ticket comment placeholder without "formatted" at the end of it, your rich text formatting will not render in outgoing notifications.
That should take care of the problem! Let us know if you get stuck. :)
For us, the ticket.latest_public_comment_formatted placeholder does not exactly what we want. As we want our e-mail notifications to look like real e-mails, we use the comment.value placeholder in our business triggers. The agents signature will be added via Liquid after the comment.value in this trigger. Using the ticket.latest_public_comment_formatted placeholder, our e-mail notifications won't look like real e-mails anymore. because it includes the date/timestamp and the agents name.
The problem is explained in detail here:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/220847487-Add-a-placeholder-for-formatted-comment-values-maybe-comment-value-formatted-
Greetings,
Oliver
Hey Oliver!
If you want your notifications to look like regular emails, we have a Support Tip that will show you how to do that! You can find it here: Setting up an unformatted email template.
Hi Jessi,
sorry for the late answer and thanks for the hint.
But this workaround will also not help completely. You will also have the name of the agent and the timestamp in the e-mail (above the comment.value). As we have this information in the usual e-mail header or in the agents signature, we do not need that in the comment section of an usual e-mail.
We have now activated the Markdown-Editor for our agents. As our agents do not know the liquid codes to format the comments, it looks like the old editor and nobody will use formatting options. This helps to prevent our agents to use formatting options, therefore our e-mails are looking still good :)
Greetings, Oliver
Hey Oliver! Thanks for letting me know what you figured out! That seems like a pretty clever workaround. :) Let us know if you need anything else!
Is there any progress on migrating this to a per-user setting?
It seems ridiculous that this is a company-wide setting, since that forces developers and non-developers to agree on their preferred method of text input -- something that will never satisfy either group.
As a temporary measure, could we have a code/preformatted option in the wysiwyg editor?
Hi Jon! Welcome to the Community!
To the best of my knowledge this isn't something that we're planning to do, but it's an interesting idea.
I checked in our Product Feedback forum, and I didn't see a similar suggestion there. I'd encourage you to head over there to share your suggestion and detailed use case. This will help our Product Managers understand why this is important and what problem it would solve for you.
We've also written an article with some helpful tips for providing useful feedback, which you can find here.
Isn't it possible to edit settings, so pictures and formatting are show correct when reading tickets on Zendesk support iphone app?
As it is now, pictures aren't shown, but listet as: "!()httos//cdn.igamges..............png)
Looks fine on the computer.
Hi Søren!
Markdown is currently not supported on iOS. You can create a product feedback, so the feature may be implemented in the future, in the page below
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066-Product-Feedback
I hope this helps!
The incoming email from the ticket requester has excel table pasted in it. This gets broken into plain text when ticket is created in Zendesk. Is this the intended design?
Example below: A single row of header is broken into multiple lines of column names. Not everyone in the team has access to the original email. What to do in this situation?
|
Id
|
Name
|
Location
|
City
Hi Aditya,
How often does this issue occur in your tickets? Have you enabled Rich Content in your account as mentioned in the article above? You can find this option under Admin>Settings>Tickets. If Rich Content is not enabled this could be the issue here.
You'll also want to keep in mind that special fonts and background images are not supported and do not appear in tickets which may also be why the content is displaying the way it is. More information can be found in our Viewing the HTML and original source for incoming tickets article.
Hope this helps!
Hi Brett,
This issue happens with all tickets which have data in excel table format. Rich content is enabled in the account as stated in the article. I don't see any special fonts. The table in original mail looks like below but gets jumbled when ticket is created in Zendesk. Any idea on what could be the issue? Its just a copy paste from excel.
Hi Aditya,
I'm going to get a ticket created on your behalf and passed over to our Support team so they can look into this further. You should receive an email shortly.
Hi there,
We have the same issue where rich text is enabled on our account, we have rich text on our macros but the email sent does not have the rich text. This includes images which end up appearing as links. The macro is set up correctly and we are not using placeholders. We can see the email formatted correctly however when testing it's clear this is not received in the same format.
Any ideas?
Hi,
Is it possible for some agents to use Markdown and some to use WYSIWYG?
Hey Alan,
These formatting options are account-wide. You won't be able to set up different functionality for multiple agents on the account.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
If you change from Makdown to RTE, how does that affect macros, auto-responses, dynamic text and other automations?
Hey Bryan,
You'll see Rich Text options directly in the ticket comment box as well as macros. This shouldn't affect any auto-responses, however.
Cheers!
How do I include a link in a macro comment desc?
Neither of the following worked:
I currently have rich content for agents enable (not sure if that's related).
Hey Andrew,
Markdown will only work in your macro if you have rich content disabled in your account.
If you have rich content enabled, then you would select the hyperlink option in the macro editor. Screenshot below:
I hope this helps!
Hi Brett,
I have Rich content enabled (I think?)...
...but I don't the hyperlink button from your screenshot on my Macro comment/description toolbar...
Hey Andrew,
If you select the T icon you should see the option.
Let me know if you don't.
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