By David Stutzman, RA, CSI, CCS
 
How many times do you create bidding requirements for projects? When writing bidding documents for publicly bid projects, the list of required forms, bid attachments, and regulations seems endless. Many of those documents are forms that change little from project to project. The changes on each form are probably the names of the project, owner, and architect. Editing those forms to insert the same data in each form at different locations can be time consuming and cause for errors. It is really embarrassing when the documents are published with the wrong name for the owner in one place that was missed when cutting and pasting new project information.

This article uses the SPECTEXT Invitation to Bid to show the kinds of variables that can be created and applied to other bidding documents and technical documents, too. The Invitation to Bid will contain all the common variables needed to format the remaining bidding documents. In the following example, the variables are shown as #variable name# to illustrate the variables that can be used. The number sign (#) is not required; it just shows the extent of the variable name.

Use copies of your files to experiment with this procedure. When you are confident of the process, put it to work to save time and improve the quality of your finished documents.

The features described here will work for MS Word 97 and later. MS Word includes a merge format that allows common data to be saved in one master file. The merge fields can be inserted in many files to display the text from the master file. This article will describe how to create a project master data file, how to insert the merge fields, and set program options so the documents will display and print correctly.

First open a new document. Enter the names of the variables and sample variable text as illustrated above. The sample text should be similar to the names in the example to mark the places where the variables are inserted. Save the document as "ProjectData.doc."

A bookmark must be created to define each variable. To view the results of this exercise set MS Word to display bookmarks. From the menu select Tools/Options. Click the View tab. Check "Bookmarks" for items to show and check "All" for Non-Printing Characters and click OK.

Select the text of the first variable #Project Name#. Do not select the paragraph mark at the end of the line unless you want to include the paragraph mark as part of the variable. From the menu, select Insert/Bookmark. Name the bookmark you are creating. MS Word does not permit spaces or special characters for bookmark names. In this case enter "ProjectName" and click Add. #Project Name# will be surrounded by brackets indicating the bookmark has been created. Repeat this procedure for each variable until all the bookmarks are defined. Then save the file.

Copy the SPECTEXT Invitation to Bid to the same folder as the saved data file. Open the Invitation to Bid. Now the merge markers must be inserted at the appropriate places. Place the cursor at the location to insert the project name. From the menu, select Insert/Field. In the Field Window, select Links and References in the left pane and INCLUDETEXT in the right pane. Click at the end of the edit box after INCLUDETEXT. Follow the field code format shown above the edit box and type the name of the data file, "ProjectData.doc." Be sure to include the quote marks surrounding the data file name. Then type a space and the name of the bookmark to be inserted.

For this example the entry should be INCLUDETEXT "ProjectData.doc" ProjectName. Click OK. The data #Project Name# will be inserted in the Invitation to Bid. The data will be surrounded by brackets to show that it is a merge field. The brackets are non-printing characters so they will not be included in the document when printed. Repeat this process for each variable location in the Invitation to Bid and save the document. Then repeat the process with each file that uses the data file.

Now set the program options to display the data correctly when the files are opened and printed. Select Tools/Options. Click the General tab and checkmark "Update automatic links at Open" so the files are displayed correctly when opened. Click the Print tab and checkmark "Update fields" to be sure the files are printed correctly.

Close the saved documents. Open the data file. Without deleting the brackets surrounding the data, select and modify the text to suit your project conditions. If the brackets are deleted, the bookmark will be removed. Then the merge fields in the project files will not find the referenced bookmark and the merge field will be marked with an error.

Open the Invitation to Bid. The file should display the new text. Sometimes MS Word can be finicky and the display will not update. If this is the case, try printing the document. The fields will be updated before the document is printed. Then the document can be saved with the updated information.

The data file must be saved in the same folder as the files that use the data, otherwise the merge function will not find the data file and the merge fields will be marked as errors when the fields are updated.

In WordPerfect version 10 and later, you can create variables and use variables to insert the same text multiple times within a document. To create a variable, place your cursor at the variable insertion point then select Insert/Variable from the menu. A window will appear to create the variable. Select the Create button. Then name the variable "Arch Name." WordPerfect has a 12 character limit on the variable name so abbreviations may be needed. Insert the actual text of the architect's name or simply "Architect Name" as the reminder of the content of the variable. Click Insert. The text that was entered as the variable contents will be inserted into the document.

To verify the text is a variable, select View/Variables from the menu. The variables in your document will be displayed on screen with small blue triangles surrounding and pointing toward the variable text. The name of the variable will be shown when the cursor is hovering over the variable. To edit the variable text, simply double click on the variable. The variable creation window will be displayed, allowing the text to be edited.

Additional variables can be created for any of the text shown in the example above using the same method. All the needed variables can be created by opening the variable window and clicking Create to define each variable, in turn.

To insert the Architect Name variable at the two locations in the first paragraph of the Invitation to Bid, move the cursor to each location. Select Insert/Variable from the menu. Highlight the appropriate variable from the displayed list and click Insert. The variable text will be displayed at each location. Variables can be inserted as many times in a document as needed.

The new variables created in the Invitation to Bid can be copied to other documents without recreating them. Save the sample Invitation to Bid. Open a new document, such as the Bid Form that requires the same basic information about the project, owner, and architect. Select Insert/Variable from the menu. In the variable window, select Options/Retrieve. Navigate to the saved Invitation to Bid, select the saved file, and click Open. All the variables from the saved file will be copied to the Bid Form. Insert the variables into the Bid Form, as needed.

Then to edit the files for a project, open the Invitation to Bid and edit the variables to suit the project. Select Insert/Variable to display the variable window. Highlight each variable name and click Edit to enter the current project data. Then close the variable window. All the variables will be updated automatically. The Invitation to Bid now contains all the correct project data for each variable. So the data can be copied to each affected file using Retrieve as described above.

Another option is to copy the variables to your default template. This will require keeping a separate template for each project or each client and selecting the correct template as the default before printing. See the WordPerfect documentation for selecting the default template. To copy the variables to the default template, open the variable window. Highlight a variable, click Copy and select click the radio button for the default template. When variables are copied into the default template, the variables are available for use in every document. Changes made to variables saved in the default template will automatically appear in every document without retrieving the variables to each document.

About the author: David Stutzman, RA, CSI. CCS is President of Focus Collaborative, a specifications consulting firm with offices in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. he can be reached at dstutzman@focuscollab.com.

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