AMCAS copy and paste question

[no beans]

In past years I seem to remember people having problems with copy and pasting activities or personal statements from Microsoft Word directly into AMCAS without seeing changes in format or strange characters. I asked on the AMCAS questions thread and was kindly told to copy/paste into text editor and then copy/paste into AMCAS. I just tried both ways (copy/pasting into text editor first versus copy/pasting directly) in AMCAS and both seem to look correct as long as I preview with PDF. Do I still need to copy/paste into text editor first? Anyone out there with experience with this? I just want to avoid problems from the start! Thanks.

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[Ismet]

It's just a precaution to paste it into a plain-text editor (TextEdit, Notepad) before putting it into AMCAS. I didn't have any problems with doing it that way, although I think AMCAS cuts off the last 10 characters if you were at the limit (they might have fixed that this year)

 

[no beans]

Thanks, Ismet. I did notice that a few characters were not accepted at the end. Fortunately I think that's my longest one. So we can feel confident if it looks good in the pdf format before printing, it will be fine?

 

[Ismet]

Thanks, Ismet. I did notice that a few characters were not accepted at the end. Fortunately I think that's my longest one. So we can feel confident if it looks good in the pdf format before printing, it will be fine?

Yep! I printed it in pdf format to proofread and as far as I know, it was fine.

 

[no beans]

Thanks!

 

[no beans]

One last question; is text edit just as good as microsoft notepad?

 

[Ismet]

One last question; is text edit just as good as microsoft notepad?

They're essentially the same, although in TextEdit you have to go to Format > Make Plain Text or else it will just keep the formatting you had in Word

 

[no beans]

Oh, I'm so glad I asked then. I didn't even see that. Thanks so much again!

 

[Slev]

Yep! I printed it in pdf format to proofread and as far as I know, it was fine.

It doesn't really matter what text editor you use, just make sure you check out the PDF of your application before you submit to make sure the formatting looks fine. If anything is off, you can fix it on the web page before you submit. Usually it's things like paragraph spacing that get messed up.