Navigating SPECTEXT® Specifications

By David Stutzman, RA, CSI, CCS

Do you know the tricks that will let you maneuver through each Section to make initial selections quickly? Do you know how go directly to paragraph 2.4 A when your client calls to discuss it? Can you issue a meaningful preliminary specification, without it being complete? Using little known and underutilized features in your word processor will speed your specification editing.

SPECTEXT® and SPECTEXT® II specification Sections rely on word processing outline and style features to control the appearance of the document. These features combine to produce the automatic numbering that appears in every Section. Because the numbering is automatic instead of inserted text, you cannot use your word processor's "Find/Replace" feature search for a specific paragraph number. Find/Replace will only find article titles or other text in the document.

This article will review several features of Microsoft® Word (available in version 97 and later) Corel WordPerfect® (version 8 and later). Now, you can skip ahead to the Section for your specific word processor. If you have time, check out what the other system offers. Both Word and WordPerfect offer distinct advantages. You never know. Perhaps the other system will allow you to complete a task more quickly.

Microsoft Word

In Microsoft Word, one of the slickest tools to move through a document set up as an outline is the document map. The document map, when active, appears as a separate panel within the active document window. The document map shows the beginning of each paragraph and the hierarchy tree for the document.
 
Display the document map from the menu bar View/Document Map (Figure 1). Remember in Word version 2000 and XP, if you have not used this feature before, it may not be visible in the drop-down menu until you wait for the entire menu to display. MS Word will display the document map for all documents until you turn the display off from the menu bar using View/Document Map.

MS Word displays the document map panel to the left of the specification document. You cannot change this position. The map shows every outline level in the SPECTEXT® Section. The map shows the paragraph number and the text of the first line of each paragraph (Figure 2). Specifier notes and other text that are not part of the outline are hidden.
 
Notice the boxes with minus signs. These show paragraphs with subparagraphs. If you click on this minus sign, all the subparagraphs will collapse, or be hidden from view. When collapsed the minus sign changes to a plus sign to mark where some text is hidden. Try clicking on several to see how they work.

To use this feature, I collapse all headings using the Part titles when I first open the document. Then I expand each Part title. This will cause the document map to show only the Part and Article titles (Figure 3).
 
Tip: Collapse the titles beginning with Part 1 and expand to show the article titles beginning with Part 3. This will keep the next Part title always visible.
 
Now, for the best part, click on any article title in the document map. Instantly, your cursor moves to that location in the document. The paragraph you selected moves to the top of the document window. You can expand Article titles individually to show the subparagraphs. Click on any subparagraph in the document map and you move to that paragraph. So when the client refers to a particular paragraph, open the file, collapse and expand the Part titles, find the right article title, click, and you are ready to discuss the text... all in a few seconds.

You can quickly delete entire articles by using the Outline view feature in Microsoft Word. Open a SPECTEXT® specification Section. From the menu bar select View/Outline (Figure 4). Or, from the lower left corner of the document window, select the icon that looks like a page of outline text (Figure 5). MS Word will show the document in a format similar to the document map. If you use the document map to collapse or expand paragraphs, the same paragraphs will appear the same in the outline view.
 
From the outline view, you can select entire articles or paragraphs, including all subparagraphs and delete your selection. Place your cursor to the left of the article or paragraph you want to delete. Double click to select. Then, use the delete key or backspace key to delete the selected text. If you do not expand subparagraphs in the outline view, you will delete them when you delete the higher-level paragraph.
 
Caution: If a specifier note appears at the end of an article to describe the following article, you will delete the note when the first article is selected and deleted in the outline view.

Using Outline view, allows you to complete "gross" editing quickly. You can delete entire articles or major groups of paragraphs and subparagraphs without viewing or scrolling through all the detail.

Corel WordPerfect

In WordPerfect, the Outline toolbar can make using SPECTEXT® specification Sections easier. Display the toolbar from the menu using View/Toolbars (Figure 6). Then select the Outline toolbar in the next window (Figure 7). The toolbar will appear on the screen. You can move the toolbar to top of the window with any other toolbars (Figure 8).

The best feature on the toolbar is Show Icons (Figure 9). Open a SPECTEXT® Section and click the button that looks like a green book. Icons will appear in the left margin of the document window. The icons are T's and numbers. The T's show that the text on that line is not automatically numbered and not part of the specification outline. The numbers tell the outline level for automatically numbered paragraphs. Part titles are Level 1 and Article titles are Level 2.
 
A minus sign may follow the number icons when first displayed. Minus signs show that subparagraphs exist in the outline level. When no sign follows the number icon, subparagraphs do not exist.
 
The icons provide a useful tool to manipulate the SPECTEXT® document. If you move your cursor to the right of the icons, the cursor changes to a double-headed vertical arrow. When the cursor takes this form, you can use the icons to select entire Parts, Articles, or paragraphs including all subparagraphs that exist for the highest level selected. Once selected using icons, you can delete blocks of text without the scrolling through the document to manually select the text.
 
Using the same technique, with the double-headed arrow cursor, the text can be selected and dragged to a new location. Click the icon to select the text and hold the mouse button. Then drag the icon to the desired position. A horizontal line that appears on the screen shows the top of the text position.
 
The toolbar has two other features you can use together to collapse the document to easily scan the contents. The button to the right of the Show Icons button is the Show Levels button(Figure 10). Show Levels allow you to automatically hide text that is below any outline level. To the left of the Show Icons button is the Show/Hide Body button. This button toggles unnumbered paragraphs making the text visible or hidden. This lets you automatically hide all specifier notes and blank lines .