Pasting from Microsoft Word to AMCAS!

the road from ms word to amcas goes through Notepad.

 

You can always preview your application by clicking on "Print Application" to see what it will look like.

 

Be very careful if you use Word. Formatting disasters have been reported on this forum in the past by those who did not heed AMCAS advice.

 

That's what I was thinking...but how do I know if the pdf I print out is exactly the same as the pdf the ADCOM sees?

Thanks,
p

 

Exactly! But to be more precise, with step-by-step instructions...

1. Select the text you want in Word, then copy it to the clipboard
2. Open NotePad (Start/Programs/Accessories)
3. Paste the text inside of NotePad
4. Make any formatting changes in NotePad (you might not have to, but just check everything out and make changes)
5. Select Everything inside of NotePad and copy to the clipboard.
6. Goto your web browser with AMCAS and paste the text there.

Done!

 

Word uses some special characters for things like em-dashes and quotation marks that don't always translate well to plain text formats. Plus it's had a fairly poor history of character counting. Like everyone else is saying, throw it through a plain-text editor like notepad or TextEdit (if on a Mac) to make sure Word hasn't done something odd.

 

If you print it out and it looks fine, you should be okay right?

 

Just make sure you're printing it from your AMCAS and not just printing from the Word document. If it looks fine when you print out your AMCAS...then it should be good.

 

with the outrageous fees we pay to AMCAS you'd think they could fix some simple formatting issues that they have been aware of for quite some time

 

I just pasted by PS into the box and hit continue and it shows a preview of my PS. It looks fine to me. Is this not the way to check it?

 

you could encounter many problems doing this. remember, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong....i f you believe in this...anything wrong can happen. and it will happen. i promise you this.

 

the great character has immense foresight. i would heed his advice. that said, as taponthecloud said, use an intermediate program to take care of formatting issues. no problem typing it up in word, but paste it to notepad/wordpad in between to take care of any formatting issues.

 

I pasted into notepad and everything seemed fine. What kind of problems are other people having?

 

It can do some funny things with some characters. It wasn't the AMCAS, but one of my secondaries took every apostrophe and turned it into a question mark (I was in Mr. Smith?s class). I'm sure stuff like that can happen on the AMCAS too.

 

Haha
Yea, I can see that happening. I was thinking spacing errors and all that jazz would happen.

Okay, thanks for the heads up!

How do you guys feel about single space and double space after a sentence? I know it's not that HUGE, but I'm at like 5250 characters and want to end a little bit.

 

While the common convention used to be double spacing after sentences (carried over from the typewriter days), now it's acceptable to only single space. Even though my PS was only ~5150 characters last year, I still kept it single spaced. Didn't see a need to change it.