Zendesk Editor Formatting Issues
Posted Dec 10, 2020
Hi,
I have spent hours trying to get an article formatted in a way that our lawyers crafted it. There were multiple layers of indentation and Terms and Conditions document has some different variations. I still could not get it in the format that the lawyers wanted it so, to meet the timeline, I put it in without indentations or just with the minimal supported indentations. This is a problem in a couple of ways. It could put us in a legal bind if how I crafted the document is different from how the lawyers intended it to be worded. It is also ugly which from a customer experience perspective, is less than ideal. I talked to your support team who gave me a number of articles which basically says that I need to take a course on HTML Web Development to get the tags right. Does that mean I need to changes the tags every time an slightly different format comes in. I also notice, while reading the comments, that this is not an uncommon problem and has been happening for years. This reminds my of how some of the editors worked in the 1980s.
There must be a way so I do not need to worry about the changing HTML tags to get a document to work. I just pass the document into the editor and it works. The problem is that some of these legal documents have multiple indentations and the Zendesk editor only likes dead simple documents.
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10 comments
Official
Katarzyna Karpinska
Hi All,
Thank you very much for your comments. We have already started working on upgrading the editing experience in Guide and we will be continually improving this area throughout the whole of next year. If you are interested in taking a look at our Knowledge Management roadmap, please check out this post.
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Onur Olmez
I share the frustration with other users. Zendesk guide formatting is a painful and is a terrible experience. Couple of examples why:
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Official
Katarzyna Karpinska
Hi All,
Thank you very much for your comments. We have already started working on upgrading the editing experience in Guide and we will be continually improving this area throughout the whole of next year. If you are interested in taking a look at our Knowledge Management roadmap, please check out this post.
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Jacqueline Lehr
I've used a lot of different platforms for authoring. Sorry, Zendesk - the Confuence editor is far better than Guide.
I participated in a listening session earlier this year where more transparency was promised. Guide product manager, would you please share an update on improvements to Guide? Thank you!
1
Stephen
Hi,
+1 for improvements to the editor in Guide.
Recently, I have been spending a lot of time in Confluence - the editor there is far more robust and easy to use. Needing knowledge of HTML / CSS to get things looking decent is not exactly reasonable for every support team.
Even small additions to the Zendesk Guide editor would be great - make tables easier to modify, allow for adding tabs, emoji's, callouts. I'm not expecting something on the scale of Confluence, but the editor is just so lacking.
It would be great to see a comment from Zendesk, as to whether there are plans to improve this.
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Danila Slezko
I have the same issues.
For example quite hard to create tables in a table with text content and images and set all padding and margin.
After publishing, the content could look not the same as I expected, and need to do some strange thing in the article editor to get the necessary result. Knowledge in HTML helps, but it always borrows a lot of time.
The biggest issue for me now it explains to other people how to "simply" create this type of content - step by step.
I totally agree that the article editor should be improved.
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Jacqueline Lehr
The shortcomings of authoring in Guide are a source of frustration for me, too. I agree it's ineffective for any content that requires anything more complex than very basic formatting. Let's hope for some eyes on this soon!
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Ryan Boyer
I totally agree with this post. +1
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Bruce Klassen
It is odd that I have not heard from anyone from Zendesk about this issue. I would definitely like some context and history about this. I am not even sure if anyone from Zendesk is reading these comments. Odd that this is a customer service application that does not seem to have customer service.
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Danila Slezko
totally agree with this post. Article editor need to improve
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Jatin Khanna
I totally second your view, facing similar problems while creating user content.
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