Does anybody have any “tricks of the trade” for writing specs with MS Word?
Thanks,
David
One word:
MasterSpec.
Otherwise, ay! carumba! what a pain. I know that probably doesn’t help much, but MS Word is not very friendly for us non-technical types like me.
Jim, David,
I have used nothing but Word for many years now, and I am totally non-technical with it. Seriously, regardless that I might do a lot of other sophisticated technical communications type things, I just can’t take the time to bother to set up anything technical in Word. I don’t define styles for paragraphs, nothing. Most of that was because I switched from a different word processor in 1995 to word and had my master core all set from the other system. I did not have the time or inclination to go reformat every different style type and then apply styles to each paragraph. My import had brought everything across with distinct ruller settings for each level of indent, and I have worked that way since then and been totally happy.
My personal philosophy is to use the most basic word processor that gets done what I need.
And, I don’t use MasterSpec, my master is my own creation.
William
David:
Like William, my office uses a “homegrown” spec as well. When we switched to Word from WordPerfect many years ago, a series of macros were created and compiled onto a “spec” toolbar for the different paragraph levels (Part, Article, Paragraph, Subparagraph, etc.). With assistance from Admin, our entire master was “converted” at one time to the new system. Some other macros included on the spec toolbar are a “block” command to keep article headings and paragraphs together or to prevent large paragraphs from splitting between two pages and an “unblock” command to get rid of all the blocks in a document. We also have a “footer” macro that you can run that makes changing footers for each project go much quicker.
Hope this helps answer your question.
As subscribers to Masterspec, we use the Masterworks macro library that they provide. It has some very effective and powerful tools. We have also written a few macros to “convert” the formatting of Masterspec as supplied into our preferred format. Although Masterworks provides some capability to do that, our macro is more powerful and does it all in one step.
One of the formats things we changed was to make the article numbers the “1.01” format rather than “1.1”, which is how Masterspec ships. Autonumbering is not for the feint of heart, however. It is one of the most poorly documented features in Word and you can make a big mess pretty easily.
I think that the one feature that MS Word users really ought to learn and properly use is styles. (sorry William!) It’s almost incomprehensible to me how anyone can effectively edit a document of any size with manually applied formatting. I’d rather spend my time doing the writing, and accomplish the formatting with a few clicks. (However, the worst “sin” is probably those who uses some styles, but use them randomly and apply manual formatting to some paragraphs, making them look like some other style. Yech!)
While macros are wonderful (I’ve been writing them, and small programs, for decades), they are not the most essential time savers. I’d say, learning effective use of styles, without necessarily using autonumbering, will save you the most time and effort. One project ought to teach you quickly. Even conversion of old masters is not really very difficult. After you’ve practiced on one or two, assigning styles to an existing spec section should take only 10 to 15 minutes - and it only needs to be done once, maybe just before you use it.
I have become nearly, but not quite, an expert in Word. If anyone gets into particular jams, I’d be happy to try to help.
Tracy,
What is the concern about long paragraphs splitting across a page? There is nothing wrong with that, text books do it all the time, so does standard literature, magazines, etc. You just have to avoid widows and orphans (a single line left ahead or behind the page break). Even word’s basic setting will attempt to avoid both of those conditions on its own. I find large amounts of random sized white space at the bottom of pages more disturbing - which some MEP consultants continually send to us that try to avoid paragraphs splitting across page breaks. I request them to reformat it.
John,
There is no doubt that if you are going to use styles, you really need to learn how to use them .
On the other hand, there is not a lot of effort in working without them.
Each level of paragraph has its own ruler that consists only of Hanging number location, word wrap location and right margin, defined as fully justified. There are no other tabs or need for them, and the document is clean and set for 12 point text in my font of choice.
I keep my master up to date constantly adding in new paragraphs with notes to the specifier about what it is for/when to or not to use it. So there is very little typing required. And if you add on a new paragraph it by default uses the paragraph above’s format. If I want a different level of indent, all I have to do is use the mouse to grab the word wrap marker in the ruler and move it and it carries the hanging indent of the start point with it correctly spaced to the appropriate location.
There is also something that many forget, you can copy and paste paragraph formats, not just text. So I can click the cursor in a paragraph I want to use for format, use the keyboard command for copy format, click in the new location, and paste the format. I do that if I get a block of new text that comes in unformatted from a consultant or some such.
Does this really take me much more time than working with formats? Not really. If there were several writers working for me, that might be a different story.
There are also some things I have discovered that making them manual as opposed to automatic (like numbering) assures that I actually look at and pay attention to a document with which I have the familiarity of many years. Just because I have to remove a paragraph ‘b’ where it may go up to ‘e’ or higher, I would rather do that just to force my attention to those other paragraphs.
On the paragraph formating using rulers rather than styles, when I converted to word, it correctly converted all the rulers of that other system. I used a conversion tool as well so that after I told the tool what the incoming and outgoing document types were, I just dropped all 300+ files on it with drag and drop and it converted them all in about 5 minutes neatly appending “converted” to the file name. No internal reformatting was required at all. Word itself has a variety of filters built into it or that you can purchase for it, but that requires you to open each file and save it to the new format.
Whether you use styles or not, its all in how you set up your document. Without using styles, but a correctly formatted document, I don’t think styles are faster or slower…but are probably essential if you have multiple writers that work with the files.
I have found that many of those using styles edit in what word calls ‘normal’ view - I always display all documents in ‘Page Layout’ view.
William
David Lorenzini had an article titled “Unlock the Power of Word - A guide to word processing” in the March issue of the Construction Specifier, and I wrote a series of articles under the title “SpecProcessor!” that appeared in many chapter newsletters. The articles are available on-line in the Library at www.CSI-MSP.org.
I found this series of articles to be a good demonstration of the old saw, “One picture worth ten thousand words.” It is a lot easier to sit down with someone and show how to do things in person than to try to explain it in words.
Lorenzini’s article is in the March, 2002 issue of The Specifier
Here is a current link to David Lorenzini’s article “Unlock the Power of Word” in the online archives of The Construction Specifier:
http://old.csinet.org/xp/p-cs/i-2002030101/a-1018966289/article.view
“tricks of the trade” for writing specs is to use WordPerfect; the best word processor ever. I have written several macros for WordPerfect that help expedite the process of setting up each project from our in-house masters.
A Real Time Saver:
I recently found a cool function in MS Word called “Compare Documents”. This function highlights the differences in any two Word documents. To find the compare function get in a Word document and go to the Tools pulldown menu, then Track Changes, then Compare Documents. Give it try!
Russell,
It is an excellent tool, and I use it quite regularly. Unfortunately Microsoft really hasn’t perfected it. You will occasionally find it gets part way through the compare, then decides that the entire remainder of the document is a change. It puts one document’s text underlined and the other’s strikethrough even though only one paragraph is different. Sometimes when I really want to get the rest of it to do a proper compare, I will make two new documents with only the portion that didn’t compare properly. Then I do the compare with those. It takes a little extra time, but it’s more reliable than manually reading it looking for changes.
I do the same. Works well.
Russsell, John, Nathan,
I have found that it is totally unreliable. Sometimes it is fine, sometimes it just trips on something and it thinks everything is new.
We have an owner that we had done a project for about 3 years earlier. He is an Owner/Builder. He came back to us for 2 more projects, we did those and we normally create a draft for review and comment.
Well, over 3 years a number of changes creep into the master, and some sections I had decided to treat very differently. Anyway, he wanted to know why we just did not use the 3 year old book. Besides the fact that the buildings actually had very different materials, that period happened to have seen a number of product revisions.
Anyway, after much complaining he requested we do this for both projects, about 150 sections each. He even agreed to supplementary services.
First I ran a random sampling of small, medium and large secctions also some that were virtually identical, some that had many changes, and I did the compare on the Mac system.
I got these anomalies that just did not make sense. Sometimes it found a new paragraph, and though that was the only one that was new and there were no other changes, it marked the entire remainder of the section as though it were totally new text. That made it wierd since I had it set to show deleted text as a strikeout and new text as italic. Unchanged text as the regular font. I display several pages of strikeout text and then though there were no changes at all, the text again in italic as though I had replaced it all.
So to see if it was just a problem with Word for Mac, we ran the exact same secctions through 2 different Win stations.
They had identical failures.
I did some checking on some discussion sites and found that it was not uncommon for Word to go bonkers in a comparison.
Since then, I don’t rely on it at all for that.
William
I’ve never tried “Compare Documents”; I still put both documents up on the screen side by side and compare visually. I wonder, however, if the problem William mentions occurs because the documents might be in different versions of Word. I’ve run into some issues with track changes with our new upgrade of Word when using older documents, usually solved by “untoggling” default settings.
Also, is “Compare Documents” tied into “Track Changes”? In otherwords, does using or not using “Track Changes” when you did the original document impact how “Compare Documents” works?
George,
No, the documents were identical versions from Word. When a new version of Word is installed, the first thing I do is open all of the documents and save them into the new version.
After I saw the strange problem on comparing them on one system, I moved them all over to another system with a different operating system and those that had the problem, still had the identical problem.
Most of the documents compared just fine. Out of 2 projects, all the separate sections, there were were only a few that had this problem.
They were not even the same documents on the 2 separate jobs, so it was not something underlying in the original base document.
Track changes made no difference being on or off. I did not have it on at first. I turned it on just to see and there was no difference.
William
Sometimes the best way to compare documents is to print out both and overlay them on a light table. I know, Stone Age, but it works. Sometimes it’s better than Compare Documents, which by the way, I do use somewhat successfully, knowing its limitations.
I find that the 2003 version of Word is a giant step backward. The document formatting controls “have more bugs than a compost heap”. Not my simile, but apt nonetheless.
I do most of the day-by-day editing in Word as it is convenient, but…
For critical formatting, I have created a set of style sheets in OpenOffice. I open the M$Word doc in OpenOffice, do my formatting, save it back in Word format and reopen in Word. The formatting stays stable. Ditto for “Compare Documents”.
Find OpenOffice (for free) at www.openoffice.org. Fully compatible with Word, including multiple user mark-up. I have used it for a year working on the SPUTT task team without a problem. Current version 2.0.2.
For those who won’t or can’t use something else, try this site for some good pointers, it is the source of the above quote>> Microsoft Word: Living with the Beast.
My favorite is the “Top MSWord Default Settings to Change Immediately After Installation”.
Have fun.
I find that the 2003 version of Word is a giant step backward. The document formatting controls “have more bugs than a compost heap”. Not my simile, but apt nonetheless.
I do most of the day-by-day editing in Word as it is convenient, but…
For critical formatting, I have created a set of style sheets in OpenOffice. I open the M$Word doc in OpenOffice, do my formatting, save it back in Word format and reopen in Word. The formatting is compatible and stays stable. Ditto for “Compare Documents”.
Find OpenOffice (for free) at www.openoffice.org. Fully compatible with Word, including multiple user mark-up. I have used it for a year working on the SPUTT task team without a problem. Current version 2.0.2.
For those who won’t or can’t use something else, try this site for some good pointers, it is the source of the above quote>> Microsoft Word: Living with the Beast.
My favorite is the “Top MSWord Default Settings to Change Immediately After Installation”.
Try also Word MVP Site Home for lots of tips on Word, much more respectful.
Have fun.
After finally tiring of editing many spec footers at the very very last minute for date changes and other type of edits that the Owner or the PM deemed ‘no big deal’, I took it upon myself to create a utility in Word using VBA programming - now it is a 3 minute operation to globally update this type of info. A worthwhile tool that can be made if you use microsoft office suite products. I only know word and VBA, not sure of other word processing programs.