Spec templates for team use

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Author Message Vivian Volz, AIA, CSI, CCS Senior Member Username: vivianvolz Post Number: 170 Registered: 06-2004 Posted on Thursday, November 02, 2017 - 06:00 pm:    I just had a lovely email conversation with an office manager at a structural engineer's office, who made an excellent suggestion for my spec template. She and her coworker also discovered a problem in MasterWorks that users should be aware of. The suggestion: Include enough filler text in your template that users can see whether you intend the text to be left-justified or full-justified. I added a few paragraphs and subparagraphs of Lorem Ipsum text (https://www.lipsum.com/) to my template, and she and another engineer were very pleased to have a visual confirmation of my intent. Running onto a second page is also helpful, for those of you whose templates include a gutter or a first-page-only header. And the bug: At the moment, if you use MasterWorks to automatically change your specs from full justified to left justified, and perhaps vice-versa, it doesn't modify the affected style, for instance PR1. Instead, it creates a new style, for instance PR1-Left. This means you now have two kinds of PR1 paragraphs in your document, and only some of them successfully corrected. She says that she filed a help ticket with ARCOM and will let me know when they respond with a fix. The most heartwarming thing about the whole conversation is how grateful she was to be treated with respect. Yet, it was also slightly sad - respect should not be unusual in her experience of professional specifiers. She makes us look good, specifiers - be sure you treat her and others in her role kindly and as colleagues! Ronald L. Geren, FCSI, AIA, CCS, CCCA, SCIP Senior Member Username: specman Post Number: 1479 Registered: 03-2003 Posted on Thursday, November 02, 2017 - 06:38 pm:    Vivian: You've discovered the same thing I did regarding MasterWorks not changing the styles. I've mentioned this to them (among other things) and this appears to be the only one they haven't fixed yet--and it's so simple to fix. Until they make the change, I've written a simple macro that changes all the paragraph styles to left-justified. Ron Geren, FCSI, AIA, CCS, CCCA, SCIP www.specsandcodes.com