Updating office masters? - MasterSpec

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Author Message David G. Axt, CCS, CSI ,SCIP Senior Member Username: david_axt Post Number: 1425 Registered: 03-2002 Posted on Thursday, October 29, 2015 - 02:08 pm:    Those of you that have Arcom MasterSpec, how do you update your office masters when Arcom updates their MasterSpec sections? David G. Axt, CCS, CSI, SCIP Specifications Consultant/Web Publisher www.localproductreps.com Tony Wolf, AIA, CCS, LEED-AP Senior Member Username: tony_wolf Post Number: 76 Registered: 11-2007 Posted on Thursday, October 29, 2015 - 02:22 pm:    with much cursing Anonymous (Unregistered Guest) Unregistered guest Posted on Thursday, October 29, 2015 - 03:16 pm:    I compare the updated MasterSpec sections against the last MasterSpec sections to see what changed first of all. I use the compare documents feature in MS Word and find that it gets close enough to show the differences. Then once you see what has changed, it's easy enough to see what you want to incorporate into the office masters. Doing things this way has shown that sometimes the "update" to the MasterSpec section has been nothing more than changing the date on the copyright notice. Other times it is just moving a paragraph or two around. Sometimes though, it is a significant technical update. If you keep up with updates this way it is much more manageable. When you miss a few, or a couple of years' worth, you might as well just start with the recent MasterSpec section and look at what you might want to add to it from your master. I do curse as well when they've taken a section and broken it up into 3 or 4 different narrow scope sections. Jeffrey Wilson CSI CCS SCIP Senior Member Username: wilsonconsulting Post Number: 184 Registered: 03-2006 Posted on Thursday, October 29, 2015 - 05:15 pm:    I generally create an entirely new office master for every section Arcom categorizes as a Section Rewrite or New Section -- usually the next time that section is included in a project. This involves importing all previous customization (readily identified because it's in red text in my master). The first step when the quarterly updates are rec'd is to identify obsolete office masters as "OLD" so I know to go to the current version when I need that section. For the categories that involve incidental revisions (Cross-References + Technical Topic) I follow a process something like Anon described to identify changes and integrate these into existing office master. Jeffrey Wilson CCS CSI SCIP Wilson Consulting Inc Ardmore PA John Bunzick, CCS, CCCA, LEED AP Senior Member Username: bunzick Post Number: 1652 Registered: 03-2002 Posted on Friday, October 30, 2015 - 09:46 am:    My process was the same as the one described by anonymous. Our office masters included "office notes" as well, making it easier to find what our master had changed (and why).