Hi,
The captain of our awards sub-team is trying to determine if the essay’s character count limit is with or without spaces.
Thanks.
Submission Format
Regional Chairman’s Award submissions will be submitted on line. The submission, excluding
the Executive Summary, will be limited to 10,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation,
and may include up to four (4) photographs totaling no more than 1.0Mb of memory.
Hope this helps! 
Yea, she just found that actually. Thanks anyway though!
Just be careful when you do submit! When you do it via the web, it may have a different count than what Microsoft word gives you. We always give a buffer of extra characters, between 50 and 100.
When you do submit, it will count up your characters. Be sure to check all the apostrophe’s and other punctuational tools to make sure they didn’t get all funky with: %; and that sorta thing, because sometimes they translate wrong when you copy and paste.
Be creative with abbreviations: year = yr, and = &, two = 2, number = #, etc. You can save a lot of characters that way.
Talked about a landscaping project in our paper. Went back and did a replace of “and” with “&”…
Make sure you check after you replace.
Teams might want to be careful with their use of abbreviations, based on this Q&A:
Q. when writing my chariman’s submission can I use shortcuts such as: and=& you=U are=R or will it count as low level language/ the judges will see less of my submission?
FRC1943 2012-02-07
A. Hello Team: Thank you for writing. We discourage using shortcuts in the submission. Thank you, FRC Team Support
Learning how to write in as concise a manner as possible without shortcuts is an important skill!
Is anyone having errors with the FIRST TIMS database ?
I’m having trouble logging in to submit the Dean’s list awards. Maybe the server is bogged
Error Information
Error Message: Error in the “team” circuit fbx_Switch.inc file (or one of its components such as an included file or variable).
Error Code: -9948
Error: No tag, type or constant was defined under the name FIRST_user->people_consentrelease_obj.
Error Code: -10010
My chairman’s student had the same problem, and I’m getting that error when I try to use TIMS.