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.
There was an e-mail blast on this very topic from FIRST earlier today. See this post for info. The important thing is to make sure that you are not using bold, underlined, italicized, or highlighted characters in your narrative. Just use straight ascii text. Then Notepad should not put any additional characters in the narrative.
-dave
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.
One thing I noticed today in regard to character count. Microsoft Word does not treat a hard return or a character. Take the following text as an example:
Dog
Cat
Word counts that as 6 characters.
From my experimentation, it seems FIRSTawards.org counts a hard return as two characters, a new line character (ASCII 10) and a carriage return (ASCII 13). FIRSTawards.org counts the red text as 10 characters.
So if you double spaced your paragraphs (i.e. hit enter twice between paragraphs), you will end up with 4 extra characters for everyone paragraph, except your last one. For example, Team 1114 has 11 paragraphs in our submission, hence we picked up 40 extra characters upon copying from Microsoft Word.
I hope this helps.
That would explain the increase in the character counts when we transferred it last night… we have some blank lines that must have been counted.
I actually applauded the switch to the new system when it first was announced, because I recognized that the focus would now be on content. We did a very basic Word document, but it did contain some simple formatting and two colors of ink (one for headers of sections), all of which was lost in transferring. The result is a document that might be difficult for the judges to read.
We will have copies of the document available at the interview, printed as intended to be viewed. We hope that the judges will be told about this “bump in the road” and don’t hold a poorly-formatted document against us.
Ours went very cleanly from Word with no trouble (other than the character count being different), and we did it several different times. The first time we had bold, underline, italics, etc. but it just went as regular text with no extraneous stuff. One thing that did transfer that I was surprised about was bullets in a bulletized list; they transferred in as bullets (solid circle) and a following tab, so we deleted the tab and put in a space online.
We followed the recommendation and went from Word to Notepad to Website. No issues and no extra character count.
I think this approach from FIRST is a positive step. This will allow judging based on the content and actions of the teams and make for a level playingg field. The character limit also forced us to get to the really important information, which will make the judges work so much easier.
Chairman’s Award Essay Character Limit: 10,000
Team 116 Essay Character Count: 9,999
Submitted On 2/18/2005 At 23:59:50
Nothing like cutting it close… 
All of our limits were maxed out just as dave said (for 04 WFA, WFA and CH), or really close to it, but we chose to let the sessions expire with everything ready, just not submitted. Though I guess you arent going to be doing much editing at 1159 anyways =p
We were also at 9,999 for Chairmans.
Tried to find a way to add one more character, but just couldn’t do it!
Mom always said I was an under-achiever.
In the past, we have had space issues, i.e., there’s just so much to put down. This year, recognizing that it would be a character limit submitted document, worked hard to keep the characters down. Good thing we did, that extra 40 or 50 characters woudl have been an issue.
I love the new format, like it has been said before the limit forces teams to only put in the important stuff and save the rest for the interview.
I also noticed this crazy addition of characters. I spent all this time cutting down to 10K in Word, and then when I put it on firstawards, it was 12K. You know, you can’t win.