<p>Hi all…was hoping to get some assistance. DS was completing the Scholarship application on mybama. He is continually receiving a message telling him he has too many characters in the activities section. Even when he cuts the characters far below other sections…same message. Has anyone experienced this problem? Thanks.</p>
<p>Tell him to delete all activities and then add a few of the best ones back in.</p>
<p>If your son will be getting an assured scholarship, the listing of activities is really not necessary.</p>
<p>Does in say a character limit anywhere?</p>
<p>He has tried that…even tried logging out and starting again. The limit is 500 characters…and he discovered that is including spaces. It is just odd…each section gives you a character count…yet when he clicks continue, it keeps telling him he is 8 characters over…no matter what he enters into this area.</p>
<p>Did he happen to cut and paste from another document? When my son did that it threw in a bunch of characters and he had to delete and start over.</p>
<p>Yes, at first he did…with the same results as your son. He started over and edited and the numbers were within the 500 limit. Yet, he is still getting the same message for that particular section. (even when the number count says he is well under the limit). Anyway, he will keep trying…just can’t seem to figure it out!</p>
<p>WHen he deleted what was in the box, did he make sure that there was not a bunch of empty space at the bottom he needed to delete? They (spaces, tabs) hide there sometimes.</p>
<p>Try highlighting below the entries, all the way to the bottom of the box and delete. Maybe that will get them all.</p>
<p>Thanks vlines…he will try that when he gets home! I just don’t understand why each section’s number count says he is below 500…but then…the error message…</p>
<p>Hmmm…he just tried again. All fields are below the 500 character limit. Yet, the same message. Guess he will try to email for assistance. Thanks for all of your help!</p>
<p>Right…</p>
<p>Once he has all text gone from the box, have him do a “right mouse click” in that “seemingly empty box” …then “select all”…then delete.</p>
<p>Then just have him put in the few best activities.</p>
<p>My daughter had the same issue last year – even after counting all the spaces she used and severely editing the list well below the 500 character limit. Ultimately, I think that she was successful when she saved her document in plain text (to eliminate any formatting codes that might be counting as characters in her .docx text), eliminated all the carriage returns (the “enters”), and put semicolons between each activity as one continuous line of text-- in other words didn’t put her activities in list form but rather paragraph form.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>Oh yes, putting the items in a list seemed to be a problem for us as well.</p>
<p>Daughter had same issue on the boxes where she went over in first place, even after eliminating down to the 500 count… It would say it was under 500, but would still be an issue – like the original error was not being cleared.</p>
<p>I cut and pasted into a document so I would remember the wording, then highlighted and deleted entire box – then I manually typed the wording back into the box, but re-worded to ensure I never pushed the 500 limit again. </p>
<p>We originally had typed her words into a microsoft outlook mail message and kept emailing it back and forth until we were ready; did this because of the warning that we only had 30 minutes or it would time out – then pasted into scholarship form.</p>
<p>Hope this helps. I also had to call the scholarship office because I had forgot to check a box for alumni (in other) – they were very helpful and manually fixed our input. I’m sure they would help you also.</p>
<p>Thank you for all of the help! Thought we were just doing something wrong. DS will try to delete the boxes and retype, using your suggestions…I’ll let you know.</p>
<p>^^^^Are you using a Mac. For some reason (last year) no matter how you formatted the wording, using a Mac produced the errors. Switched to Dell and voila, no problem. UA software and Mac’s are not fully compatible ie: when using degree works program on the Mac, there will be some minor glitches.</p>
<p>BamaAF…tried your strategy…thought for sure it would work.</p>
<p>Robot…No…DS is using a dell. Tried cutting way down…still same message. He emailed the scholarship address this morning. I’m sure they will get back to him soon. Thank you all for all of the suggestions…really appreciate the help!</p>
<p>Another thing you can try is to 1) use a different browser (Firefox vs. IE vs. Chrome), or 2) go into the settings and delete your cache and then quit the browser and reboot the machine. Sometimes, “stuff” gets left in memory even though you think that you’ve cleared it. If I recall, we used the paragraph approach last year as mentioned above so that the “hidden” carriage return & line feed non-printable characters were not in there. Also, we typed in in notepad first so no non-printable characters were coming over from MS Word either. Good news is, it DID eventually work.</p>
<p>I remember now the same thing happened to my son last year. It was the browser. he was using Firefox and the application could not recognize it. I remember contacting our regional rep and shesaid she never heard of this problem. Anyway, use a deifferent browser and you should be all set.</p>
<p>Good luck, roll tide.</p>
<p>Ok – had to resubmit because they posted new scholarship form – one of the areas was red and would not let me submit because it said we were over the character limit even though the character counter said it was only 490. What I had to do was keep trimming down until it was about 470 or so – guess the character counter and error flag is not synced up. When I got down to 470 or so it allowed us to submit. Hope this helps.</p>
<p>Update: It finally worked! DS retyped the information into an outlook message (that helped). But he had to stay under 450 characters for the information to be accepted. Like BamaAF, he thought it might accept 470-475 characters (when the character count turns orange). No such luck. For DS, 449 was the majic number.</p>