[David Kelly]

Originally Posted by KathieK

Did anyone else have problems transferring their submissions from Word to Notepad and then to the website? We tried several times and it increased the number of characters. It made for an interesting evening... Especially since our submission looked so nice in Word and it really lost something in the translation. I wonder about the teams who already posted their submissions...

I will try and get ours posted to the CD white papers section this weekend.

The reason that FIRST sent out the email blast to transfer the the text from your submission from Word to Notepad is because of several problems that users were encountering. Microsoft and Word likes to use their own special formatting to create their files. For example users were getting extraneous characters when they pasted and it showed HTML codes for quotations or commas, etc. Word assumes that the text boxes are HTML enabled so it just transferers those codes with it and then interperates them as additional characters (that may not make much sence, but I'm super tired at this time trying to reply to this).

FIRST decided this year to use the FIRSTawards system to create a more equal base for all teams to concentrate on content rather than style or the look of a presentation. It also takes care of the many problems of file compatability or size issues that have plagued the judges in the past.

The system isn't perfect and I'm sure they designers will improve the system even better for next year.