Full 5-column sheet specifications in MS Word

[Richard_Morrison]

This may not be useful to those who don't do architectural-grade specifications, but if you'd like to do full sheet (24" x 36" or larger) specifications in Word, with maybe 5 columns, you will be faced with the 22" maximum page dimension that Word allows. There is a work-around by creating everything at 1/2 size, and then enlarging the output at 200% 

 

If you want a 5-column layout to be 22" tall by 32" wide, say, make the Word document 11" tall by 16" wide, and use a font size that is 1/2 the size of the font you'd ultimately like to have. (I find that 5 pt. works well in Word for the standard text; 8 pt. for Section Titles, which ultimately will become 10 pt. text and 16 pt. titles). Write your specifications, and print to PDF. Then place the PDF in Chief with a 200% enlargement. It is easiest to edit this document in Draft mode in Word.

 

There you go!

[jorgearaya]

Eric has a great tutorial on that, I was using the same principle for all my notes on all my drafting programs.

 

This is also a feature I requested a while back for Chief here. https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/2092-importing-and-linked-files-xref/#entry16292

 

Must add that I don't use MSOffice, instead I am a supporter and user of LibreOffice.

[MarkMc]

FWIW- Open Office Writer allows larger sizes-at least to 36 x 48. Can read and write to Word formats but likely lose the size if importing to MS.

[jorgearaya]

Perhaps the last portion of my comment was a "hint"...  

[BryceEngstrom]

I don't do a lot of this, but even just for customizing general notes, this is a big help since it is such a PITA to do in Chief's primitive text tools.  I too am a big fan and long time user of Open Office. Still, adding PDF's to Chief has a way of greatly expanding both the size of the Chief layout file, as well as the PDF output file for printing.