Formatting options for agents

What's my plan?

All Suites | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Support | Team, Professional, or Enterprise

This article describes how admins can allow agents to add bolding, italics, lists, and other formatting, as well as images and color text, to their ticket comments and macros. Formatting can help make tickets and the email notifications that are sent to requesters easier to read and understand.

This article includes the these sections:

Formatting content in the agent interface

Formatting limitations

Turning on or turning off color text

Formatting content in the agent interface

The formatting options described in this section are available automatically in the agent interface and are applied to your whole account. Your agents have a combination of formatting options within the same rich content editor, CKEditor. You don’t have to choose between a Rich content editor and a Markdown editor for your agents.

Agents can format from the toolbar:

Agents can also enter Markdown commands:

This editor is available to agents when they create new tickets, add ticket comments, make bulk editing changes to tickets, and update any tickets created from integrations that use the Zendesk Channel Framework.

Both rich content and markdown formatting options are enabled automatically in your account.

Formatting limitations

This section describes some limitations for using the combined rich content and Markdown editor in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

This combined experience is not available in the macro editor.

Rich-content formatting inside code blocks is not supported.

Using the down arrow key to escape the code block is not supported. To escape a code block, press the Return key three times.

Image resizing using the up and down arrow keys is not supported.

Horizontal rule elements will always be on their own line. They cannot be inside of other elements.

You can only indent a list item if it is at the same level as a previous list item. You can’t indent blockquotes. You can only indent the text inside of blockquotes.

Using the markdown underline symbol (_) for underlined text is not supported. For example, typing _Important_ does not appear as Important. You can use underline symbols (_) in addition to asterisks (*) to make text bold or italic. For example, typing _Note_ and __Caution__ appears as Note and Caution.

Turning on or turning off color text

In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, admins can use formatting options to turn color text on or off. This account-wide setting enables admins to control whether or not agents can add text color and background color in ticket comments. See Changing text color. Color text is on by default in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. When color text is turned off, agents will not see a color picker in the text toolbar.

Color text is available only in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, not the standard agent interface.

To turn off color text

In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.

Click Comment options for agents to expand it.

Deselect Allow agents to change the text color.
Later, if you want to turn color text back on, select Allow agents to change the text color.