Chairman's Award submission formatting issues

[Ternz]

Originally Posted by Amanda Morrison

I wrote to FIRST about the lack of formatting in the awards submissions, and here's the response I received:

"How are you entering your Chairman’s Award Submission? Are you copying and pasting it into the box? If so, the system will omit the formatting that you did in your original document. However, you should be able to reinstate it by going through the one long paragraph and putting in the spaces, tabs, breaks, etc. yourself. You can also create paragraphs by typing your essay directly into the box for submission."

Hope that solves the mystery!

Unfortunately, that does not fix the issue, at least for Woodie Flowers (I have not tried with Chairman's, but the submission format is exactly the same, so I would imagine there is no difference.)

As stated previously above, when you save the essay, which included tabs and enters, that was copied-and-pasted into the text box, the form shows a clump - one long paragraph without any tabs and enters. For Woodie Flowers: when you go back to "Edit Details" to hopefully reinstall those spaces and enters, the essay is back how it was originally - with spaces and tabs. Thus, the solution which FIRST proposed, at elast for Woodie Flowers, does not work.

[Ternz]

Originally Posted by Ternz

Unfortunately, that does not fix the issue, at least for Woodie Flowers (I have not tried with Chairman's, but the submission format is exactly the same, so I would imagine there is no difference.)

As stated previously above, when you save the essay, which included tabs and enters, that was copied-and-pasted into the text box, the form shows a clump - one long paragraph without any tabs and enters. For Woodie Flowers: when you go back to "Edit Details" to hopefully reinstall those spaces and enters, the essay is back how it was originally - with spaces and tabs. Thus, the solution which FIRST proposed, at elast for Woodie Flowers, does not work.

Let me elaborate on the end of that. Since the essay is back how it was originally, you cannot add the spaces and things into the essay so it saves like that. It still saves as it was before.

[AnibaS]

I have tried many methods, and nothing seems to work. If anyone finds a way to make it work, please let us know!

[Ternz]

PLEASE NOTE that the ACTUAL limit on characters, according to Microsoft Word, is precisely 9,948.

[temujin]

Is it possible that you could save your Word document as a text file, or a wordpad file, and copy/paste that? I haven't tried it, but...

[Ternz]

We tried using a notepad file, but that didn't work too well because the width of the file was different than the width of the submission box. That might have been an error of mine, though.
We found it best to indicate at the top of the submission that ~ would indicate a new paragraph, and then add that in between the paragraphs.

[ami yang]

I think every team is having this issue. Our team just took out characters and cried.

[Salmanz]

Is anyone else just leaving it like a big blob?

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by Salmanz

Is anyone else just leaving it like a big blob?

We are...

[Cynette]

Originally Posted by Salmanz

Is anyone else just leaving it like a big blob?

We did!

[Salmanz]

Okay, i thought we were the only ones.

[AnibaS]

Originally Posted by Salmanz

Is anyone else just leaving it like a big blob?

Our team is! We have already reached our character limit, so we cannot unfortunately find a way to creatively indicate paragraphs.... hopefully the judges will understand!

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by AnibaS

Our team is! We have already reached our character limit, so we cannot unfortunately find a way to creatively indicate paragraphs.... hopefully the judges will understand!

We wound up doing something like this:

[PARAGRAPH TOPIC SOMETHING A] blah blah blah blah..............

The stuff in brackets being our topic separator.

[rsisk]

Hopefully when they print the documents for the RCA judges, they go into the edit mode and copy there, at least the paragraph breaks are there.

We are going to find someone to get a printed copy to the RCA judges as soon as we get to the competition.

[gibbyrawr]

I'm actually assuming the system is displaying our submissions with no format but once it gets accessed by administrators or judges the format will return. I think it's simply for the character count. Or at least I am hoping so. Either way if our essay shows up the same way it should still get the same point accross. Lets hope all our submissions return to original formatting!!!! Keep your fingers crossed. I am Good luck everyone!