Notes, Documents & the Library
Note — desktop feature. This chapter describes the TechieCRM desktop application. The web portal carries a simpler Library: a flat list of items you can add, edit and delete, with a title, a description, a file type and a public/private flag. The folder tree, the document preview (PDF and Word/Excel rendering), opening a document in your own application, attaching a real file, tags, and the toolbars, right-click actions and automations described below do not exist there yet.
Source-CRM equivalents: Notes and Documents, Company Library.
In this chapter - Notes - Documents (and the Document Editor) - Emails filed on a record - The Library (desktop, and on the web portal) - Not yet available
If part of the timeline can't be read from the database, Interactions says so: a red "
could not be loaded" row appears at the top of the list — one per affected section (Notes, Documents, To-Dos, Meetings, Emails, Sales, Service, Agreements…) — with the reason. That row is a message, not a record: it can't be opened, selected or deleted. A section that genuinely has nothing simply shows no rows, so an empty history and a failed query never look the same. Reload the client (or reconnect) to clear the warning.The same rule now covers the case where TechieCRM can't even read the shape of a table (connection dropped mid-load, or your sign-in isn't allowed to read the database catalogue): you get the warning row naming the table, instead of a section that quietly shows nothing.
The Interactions toolbar (September 2026). The buttons on the right of the Interactions title strip all work now; until this release Refresh and Close were on screen, looked enabled and did nothing when clicked.
- Refresh — re-reads the whole timeline for the current client or contact.
- ⚙ Settings — says plainly that Interactions has no Settings page of its own yet, and names the pages that do govern it.
- Close — hides the Interactions panel. Nothing is deleted. Click Clients in the icon bar to bring it back.
The ↑ / ↓ arrow buttons have been removed (September 2026). They briefly did move the highlight up and down the list, but nobody used them and the keyboard does it better.
Keyboard. Click any row, then ↓ and ↑ move the highlight to the next / previous interaction and Enter opens it — the same as double-clicking. Both stop at the first and last row instead of wrapping, and skip rows the type filter is hiding.
See Chapter 3 for the same cluster on the Clients and Related panels, and for the full list of keys.
A table your database simply doesn't have is different — that is a feature this database doesn't carry, so the section stays empty and silent, which is the honest answer.
Not signed in to the CRM database is not a fault. If you are running without a SQL connection — a TechieCRM Cloud-only sign-in, or you closed the login without connecting — Interactions no longer fills the list with red "could not be loaded" rows for every section it was never going to be able to read. It simply shows what it can read (your synced text messages and meeting notes, which live locally) and stays quiet about the rest. Before the September 2026 update a perfectly healthy Cloud-only session showed twelve alarming warning rows on every client. A database that is connected but cannot answer still warns you, loudly, exactly as described above.
Saving a note or a document has the same rule. If TechieCRM cannot read the shape of the notes or documents table when you press OK, the save is refused with the real reason — "The schema of 'AMGR_Notes_Tbl' could not be read from the database: …" — rather than the bare SQL error the earlier builds produced, which named a syntax problem and never mentioned the dropped connection that actually caused it. Nothing is written either way, so nothing is half-saved.
Notes
Notes appear in a record's Interactions (type Notes). Add: right-click ▸ Add ▸ Note, or the
ribbon Note button. The note dialog ("Note Details for '
Documents
Interactions type Documents lists the record's documents with a file-type icon (Word, Excel, PDF, images, email…). Open shows Document Details (description, date, creator, type, category, client, contact) with Edit → the Document Editor: description, category (General, Correspondence, Contract, Proposal, Invoice, Report, Presentation, Technical, Legal…), full rich-text editor with a Source tab, File menu (New, Open, Save, Save As, Export as HTML, Print, Print Preview), Edit menu, View toolbars.
Documents are stored in the source database, on the client's record (or the selected contact's): - Add: right-click ▸ Add ▸ Document (a client must be selected). Enter a description, pick a category, write the body, then File ▸ Save — the document is written to the source CRM and appears in Interactions as an HTML Document. (File ▸ Save As still writes a local file instead.) - Edit: Document Details ▸ Edit reopens a document made in the editor and Save updates it in place. Files attached from other applications (Word, Excel, PDF…) and emails can't be edited in the built-in editor — Edit says so and points you to Open / Save As. - Open: extracts the document and opens it in the application registered for its file type; an Email Message opens in the email viewer instead. - Save As: exports the stored document to a file you choose (an email exports its body as HTML). - Delete: on Document Details, or right-click the row ▸ Delete / Delete Selected. Deleting a filed email also removes its paired "An email has been sent to…" note. Deletes ask for confirmation and need delete rights on Clients.
Emails on a record
Interactions type Emails lists the source CRM's email documents (from any source, including the ones the desktop files when you Send Email — Chapter 12). Open shows Subject, From, To, CC, Date and the body. The Email icon-bar module (Chapter 12) shows the same emails for the current client with a preview. Right-click ▸ Add ▸ Email opens Send Email… for the current client (Chapter 12) — the sent message is filed on the record. Rows of type Emails that come from the source CRM's outgoing mail queue can be removed with Delete; filed emails are deleted from Document Details.
The Library (source CRM: Company Library)
Icon bar ▸ Library — three areas: COMPANY LIBRARY (folder tree; expanded folders are remembered), KNOWLEDGE BASE (Chapter 18) and PREVIEW on the right. - Click a folder → its description and document count; click a document → preview (PDF in an embedded viewer; Word/RTF/Excel rendered to PDF via LibreOffice when installed, else extracted text; notes and web links inline). - Double-click a document → opens it in your default application (web links in the browser). Right-click ▸ Open, Save As…, Email Document…, Properties; folders ▸ Expand / Collapse, Add Folder…, Add Document…, Properties. Toggle Preview hides/shows the pane. Panel sizes are remembered. - Toolbar (September 2026 update — these five buttons used to say "not yet implemented"): Add Document adds a file from your computer or a hyperlink into a folder (the selected folder is offered first) and selects it in the tree; Add Folder creates a folder under the selected (or chosen) parent; Search finds folders and documents by name, author and creation date range, in all folders or the current folder and its subfolders — matches stay visible with their folders expanded, everything else is hidden until Show all or Refresh; Properties shows location, type, size, owner, creator and dates and lets you rename the item; Email Document opens your desktop e-mail composer with the document attached (a web link goes in the body, a note as its text). Adding and renaming are writes: a read-only plan or a user without Library write rights is stopped before anything changes. A rename changes the tree entry and the document's stored description together — if either cannot be updated, neither changes. - No ⚙ Settings button. The Library has no configurable settings anywhere in the application, so as of the September 2026 update the toolbar simply has no gear to click, rather than one that opens a message saying so. (Before that it re-opened Settings on whichever tab you last had open, which looked as though the Library had a page there.) - An empty Library, and why. A database that doesn't carry the Company Library tables shows "No library folders available" — that is the true answer and nothing is wrong. From the September 2026 update, a Library that could not be read (connection dropped, or your sign-in isn't allowed to read the database catalogue) is recorded as a fault in the diagnostics log instead of being passed off as "no folders", and one transient failure no longer switches the Library off for the rest of your session — the next refresh tries again. (The tree still shows the same "No library folders available" line in this release; a visible on-screen reason is still to come.)
On the web portal
Library in the icon bar opens the master-detail workspace: your documents on top, a Preview pane for the selected one below. Columns are Title, File type, Visibility (Public / Private) and Created — every one sorts, and every column sort runs on the server, so it stays correct however many documents the library holds (paging and Show all work as described in Chapter 20). The item count next to the title is the real total, not a preview of the first page. Quick Search matches the title and description.
A View dropdown at the left of the toolbar switches between Library and Knowledge Base (Chapter 18) — the same page, a different collection underneath, matching the desktop where the Knowledge Base panel lives inside the Company Library window. Switching to Knowledge Base replaces the columns, the Add button and the filters with that module's own; switching back returns you to your documents. If your security group has been denied Knowledge Base specifically, the Knowledge Base option is not offered here (Library itself is a separate permission and stays open).
To add an item use the ribbon — Home ▸ Create ▸ Article (the button itself, and its New Document child, open the same form) — or the + Add button above the list.
The web portal's ribbon still uses the older wording for these entries. On the desktop the same buttons now read Article ▾ ▸ Document / Note / Hyperlink and Folder — inside a Create group the verb is the group title, so the button is just the noun (
docs/design/product_vocabulary.md). Same buttons, same behaviour, shorter captions. The form collects a Title, a Description, a File type (the extension, e.g.
The rest of the Create group is honest about not being built: New Note, New Hyperlink, Add Folder, Paste Document, Paste Link Document and Email Article all answer "the '…' function has not been connected yet." They are waiting on storage the shared record does not have yet — there is nowhere to keep a hyperlink's web address, a note's body, or the folder a document sits in — and on the ability to upload a real file. They will be connected in the same release that adds those; until then the dialog tells you the truth rather than saving something incomplete.
Not yet available
Attaching a real file as a document on a client (only the built-in rich-text editor exists — documents it saves are stored as HTML, which the source CRM lists but may not render in its own viewer); a note category/type field; creating the Company Library's own rich-text note items (files and hyperlinks can be added; the source CRM's note format cannot be written yet); moving or deleting Library items and folders; Library folder security (owner / read access).