The Load an External Document process (Common > Correspondence > Load an External Document) enables a document created externally from Sonata to be associated with accounts or clients within Sonata.
Correspondence letter requests are created for the external document to enable the letter to be previewed and printed directly, instead of Sonata creating the correspondence via the standard merge process. On completion of the load process the source file is copied to the target folder specified on the letter template or, if not specified, on the document path specified under System Variables (Common > Static Data > System Variables).
The external document may be in any format that is supported by Internet Explorer (e.g. pdf, word, excel).
Note - If user experiences any difficulty in displaying the selected document, check with your system administrator to ensure the relevant application, that has been installed to enable previewing by Internet Explorer.
External documents are not able to be edited from within Sonata.
Important Note - Although user is able to undertake steps, which for internal documents leads to the editing of the document, any changes that are made are not saved in an external document. In these situations, a new document may be created and saved, but the copy of the external document which is associated with Sonata remains unchanged.
Therefore, when subsequently viewing the document, user does not see any of the changes which he might think he has made - these are not saved in this copy of the document.