<p>After a week of working tirelessly to complete my supplements, I was ready to submit my UPenn application today. </p>
<p>I opened my Word document, clicked copy, and after trying to paste in every way possible, I cannot manage to get the text to appear in the Common Application page. </p>
<p>In addition to copying and pasting from a Word document on my Mac, I also pasted the text in an e-mail and then tried to copy/paste that text. No luck. </p>
<p>As a last resort, I borrowed my Mom's PC and tried to copy/paste from that machine. Again, no luck. </p>
<p>This is a disaster. Can any techie provide some advice?!?</p>
<p>I don't know if it is always this way, but when I was copying and pasting, the application looked like it wasn't pasted until after I went to some other part of the application and came back.</p>
<p>Hey I know exactly what you are talking about, I had a similar problem with a different college's supplement. I am working on a mac as well. What you have to do is click "save as" on the document, select "text file" (the extension will be .txt), and resave. Send this new document to your mom's PC. Sign on to the commonapp on that PC. Highlight the paragraph and go to "edit > copy". Go to the box on the commonapp and click "edit > paste". Worked for me! Reply if it doesn't work .. Saved me a lot of time I was freaking out about having to retype three essays for one supplement!!</p>
<p>It comes 'as is'. I'm probably not going to have time to update this thing.</p>
<p>How it works:
1) Set the wait time to a couple of seconds (5 by default).
2) Paste your essay into the box.
3) Click "Type!" The program will wait for the specified time so that you can switch windows to whatever browser you have CommonApp.org open in, and place your cursor in the desired box. When the wait is up, it will start retyping the text.</p>
<p>It doesn't always catch every character properly, so check to see that all punctuation was typed properly. Any unrecognized characters will be typed as x.</p>
<p>D couldn't do it using Safari (on a Mac), but it works ok on our Windows machine on Firefox. </p>
<p>(The common ap software is a piece of junk -- they still can't get the symbols to display properly showing which schools you've submitted already, and it has been a known problem for three months. Then there's their lovely response in the FAQ to the question:
After printing my application in PDF, some fields I have filled in on the application are blank, and others are not displaying the entire text. What do I need to do?</p>
<pre><code>Their answer: The PDF version of your application may not display some of your answers correctly. As long as they are saved to your application properly, they will be saved in the institution's database properly, even if they are not displaying correctly (or at all) on the PDF. You may want to check the pages of your application carefully before you submit it to ensure that your answers were saved properly.
</code></pre>
<p>arabrab, having written software that generates PDFs from Web form entries, I can tell you that their answer to that question is actually quite reasonable. They might have avoided the problem by using a different font in the PDF for text entry, but then they would have had to apply further restrictions on the size of your form fields. Instead, they chose to live with the PDF problem in favor of letting you enter longer answers.</p>
<p>lmao thats so funny that u said “Send this new document to your mom’s PC.” lol cuz my mom DOES have a pc and not a mac lol idk doesnt sound funny but it is lol</p>