How to auto-number your packets in MS Word - For Dummies

[Gautam]

Packetizing is a long and tedious process. There are some ways of making it faster and less error-prone.

Numbering questions is one of those ways - it helps you ensure you're not missing questions or have extra questions that could be used elsewhere, etc. However, doing this manually is tedious... and multiplied over 15-20 packets, it is a royal pain in the ass. For now, when we are still in the age of using MS word to packetize, I'd like to give all of you head-editors and chief packetizers a few extra hours to relax before the tournament. I am herein posting a quick and dirty way use the Numbering feature in MS Word to make your packetizing process easier.

Assumptions

The guide assumes:
* you are working on an ACF or mACF tournament (i.e. won't work for lightning rounds and other nonsense)
* your questions are randomized - to speed-up randomization I suggest that you "just use some old template you used for some old tournament and make minor adjustments here and there - then copy/past questions as you go along."
* you are doing the below steps in MS Word - they will not work in Google Docs. I have not attempted this in Open Office or Libre Office, so I can't comment - please attempt yourself and let us know how things work.

Process

Some background: You can find paragraph breaks and line breaks in MS Word using special characters. Paragraph breaks (i.e. pressing a regular enter button, or the <p> html tag) are "^p" [up-carat followed by lower-case p ] and line-breaks (i.e. pressing shift+enter or the <br> html tag) are "^l" [up-carat followed by lower case l]. For the most part, my guide involves swapping out para-breaks for linebreaks.

1. Open up your "Find/Replace" box. This is different in different versions of Word, so I'm not going to tell you how to find. Look it up on the internet if you need to learn.

2. In the find box, type in "^p^p^p" and replace all with "^p^p". Repeat until there are 0 matches.
NOTE: We are doing this to get rid of any random blank spaces.
NOTE: There may be random page-breaks that won't be captured by this. Just delete them manually for now.

3. In the find box, type in "^p[" and replace all with "^l[".
NOTE: We are doing this to get all bonus parts which start with [10] to be a part of the same paragraph as the preceding line(s).
NOTE: There should be at least 60 matches. If there aren't, then you either have malformatted bonuses, or (more likely) you are missing bonuses.

4. In the find box, type in "^pANSWER:" and replace all with "^lANSWER:".
NOTE: We are doing this to get all the answerlines to be a part of the same paragraph as the preceding line(s).
NOTE: There should be at least 80 matches (20 tossups, 60 bonus answers). If you don't have at least 80, you are missing questions.

5. In the find box, type in "^p^p" and replace all with "^l^p"
NOTE: we are doing this to make sure any line-breaks we have for visually separating questions (i.e. between tossups) are actually setup as line breaks in the doc.

6. Select all your regulation tossups. Click on the Numbering button - this should be in your formatting toolbar and should have the numbers 1, 2, and 3 written on it. You will see your tossups automagically numbered.

7. Repeat step #6 with all regulation bonuses.

8. Scan through document, make sure there are no mismatches anywhere. It is occasionally possible to have extra numbers if, for instance, you have "Note to moderator" text or random comments left by your editing crew.

9. Numbering automatically changes indentation, too. Adjust indentation as necessary.

10. Sometimes, when you click the "Replace All" button, MS word may put in text in weird fonts and/or font sizes. I strongly suggest that you Ctrl + A and Change the size to 10 TNR, and also fix line-spacing to single with no fixed spacing. Again, I'm not going to tell you how to do this - you should know this by now.

If you do this a few times, you should be able whittle down a packet in 3-5 minutes. So numbering and prettifying a 15-packet set should take about 45 mins to an hour at most. If you want to look at the final products of this process, check out the 2009 ACF Fall set, the 2014 Chicago Open set (the look and feel of this set was described by Andrew Hart as "beautiful"), or the 2010 MUT set.

If somebody can make a VB script out of this and make our lives easier, the quizbowl community would be most appreciative.

[Cody]

If one first replaces ^p^p with a placeholder character that isn't used in the set, such as @ or `, then one just replaces ^p w/ ^l and @/` w/ ^p^p. This will make sure any blocks of text are definitely kept together (such as the mentioned "Note to moderator").

Far more importantly than numbering, which can be done/hacked a number of ways -- including having numbers in the packet beforehand, this takes cares of questions breaking across a page if one selects all [except packet header], goes to Paragraph > Line and Page Breaks, and selects "Keep lines together" (or possibly that and "Keep with next" -- I think I did both when I did this).

(the methods above relayed to me by Matt Weiner and used by me for Penn Bowl)

The number of replacements is normally pretty useless unless you notice that it's anomalously low. Better is to ignore it, turn on all the formatting marks, and check through the packet.

The weird formatting thing shouldn't happen if the writer / editor has taken care to properly format their questions, but can mostly be fixed by Ctrl-A'ing and making sure the entire packet is in the correct font/size and making sure the replace field does not have any intrinsic formatting.

As far as I know, LibreOffice has no support for this.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Would this work if, instead of following steps 1 through 5 upon questions written as usual, the writing team for a set just made sure from the beginning to use soft returns between question text & subsequent answer lines (by pressing Shift+Enter) instead of hard returns (by pressing just Enter)? I imagine some amount of Find-Replace would still be needed in case anyone ever forgot and used a hard return anywhere, but as a technical point I don't know if there's any major difference between what Shift+Enter produces and whatever an "^l" is.

the 2014 Chicago Open set (the look and feel of this set was described by Andrew Hart as "beautiful")

A truly impartial spectator, that Andrew Hart. (I jest. The set does in fact look very good.)

[Cody]

Would this work if, instead of following steps 1 through 5 upon questions written as usual, the writing team for a set just made sure from the beginning to use soft returns between question text & subsequent answer lines (by pressing Shift+Enter) instead of hard returns (by pressing just Enter)? I imagine some amount of Find-Replace would still be needed in case anyone ever forgot and used a hard return anywhere, but as a technical point I don't know if there's any major difference between what Shift+Enter produces and whatever an "^l" is.

I would strongly advise against doing this.

^l is what Shift+Enter produces, at least in Word and Google Docs. However, trying to get people to do this is going to create problems for you. Finding and replacing a tournament that ALWAYS uses ^p (something it's easy to get people to do since it's natural) is a cinch. Trying to sort out a mixed up ^p and ^l is going to be a huge pain (something that happens already when expecting people to use ^p but they've randomly decided to use ^l!). You're going to be blindsided by all sorts of things like edited questions that mix use because the editor didn't delete all the ^p and replace with ^l (and why should they -- this is something that can be done in seconds w/ find-and-replace), or questions that are now separated by a ^l.

Make people use ^p (Enter) and then find-and-replace. It takes seconds, which is a lot less time than getting an editing team to conform to some aberrant standard they aren't used to, and will save you a lot of headaches.

For Penn Bowl, the only find-and-replaces that needed to happen were ^p^p => @; ^p => ^l; @ => ^p^p. Put your time into making sure everyone puts questions in packets properly (i.e. there should be no need to replace ^p^p^p w/ ^p^p) and that they're being fastidious about the formatting of their questions rather than trying to enforce the use of ^l; this way is much more likely to reduce problems.

the 2014 Chicago Open set (the look and feel of this set was described by Andrew Hart as "beautiful")

A truly impartial spectator, that Andrew Hart. (I jest. The set does in fact look very good.)

Let's be real for a second. I have no gripes with the layout of CO 2014, but it used Times New Roman. A set that looks very good this does not make.

[UlyssesInvictus]

So I'll probably post in the tech forum soon about this as well, but has the recent slate of efforts to combine qb with tech done anything about packetizing? It seems as if the focus is mainly on tournament handling, but I'm not aware if anyone has considered packet building, since I haven't been part of the google group at all.

I ask because this doesn't actually seem like a very complicated thing to program and I'm considering (for my intro cs final project) making a bit of software that teams can use to build packets without having to go through the annoying manual packetizing process (i.e. by outputting a nice .zip of pdfs/docs). It'd also be built to handle the writing process, so that people can write questions within the program, edit them, assign subjects and other tags, and (among other things) assign criteria for the packetizing process. The inspiration is the old TJQB website's tournament builder, though it was more of a database than a packetizer.

I'm not very familiar with web programming and security, so my first instinct is to make this an offline tool, but obviously that limits collaboration to google docs. I'll probably do this in python if offline or php if online. If anyone is currently working on something similar or has experience with the challenges of a project like this, please let me know. Since I am planning to do this as a school assignment, I probably can't collaborate, but (if I do do this) once I'm finished with a rudimentary package I'll upload it to github.

[Excelsior (smack)]

Not to speak for Jerry, but this is an obvious feature for eventual inclusion in QEMS2 (if it isn't already there - I haven't checked).

[UlyssesInvictus]

Not to speak for Jerry, but this is an obvious feature for eventual inclusion in QEMS2 (if it isn't already there - I haven't checked).

This is the HSAPQ system, right? Is HSAPQ planning to make this open source? NAQT has Ginseng as well, but that's not really something available for house-writes or ACF.

[Excelsior (smack)]

Not to speak for Jerry, but this is an obvious feature for eventual inclusion in QEMS2 (if it isn't already there - I haven't checked).

This is the HSAPQ system, right? Is HSAPQ planning to make this open source? NAQT has Ginseng as well, but that's not really something available for house-writes or ACF.

https://github.com/grapesmoker/qems2

[UlyssesInvictus]

Ah, okay--I guess this will end up just being a vanity project for myself, then.

Thanks for the response!