September 23, 2005

Internet Resources

Korky Koroluk

Spec software helps writers’ block

The National Master Specification is a big, complex document and apart from specification writers, few people know much about it.

It’s a key part of the Canadian construction industry though a comprehensive library of construction specifications that is used on both public- and private-sectors jobs. It contains more than 650 specification sections and if you want a hard copy of it, it runs roughly 4,000 pages.

It’s also available in electronic form, of course, but extracting the information from it would still be a time-consuming task were it not for the development of software editors that speed up the process.

These editors are usually available from the same firm where the master spec is purchased, and they have made the spec writer’s life a lot easier.

One, NMS-Edit Professional is published in Ottawa by Innovative Technology Inc. In one form or another, it has been around for more than a decade.

Mike Thornber is the company president and a co-founder, and during a recent chat he said NMS-Edit is basically a word processor with a database attached. He’s looked around the market in Canada and the United States, and hasn’t found another product that operates that way.

Most, he said, are solely database tools built on Microsoft Access. They allow the spec writer to turn paragraphs in the master spec on and off, and thus generate a project spec.

NMS-Edit works with Microsoft Word, and uses automatic features to pull information out of the master spec database to create a project spec.

To do this it has two components. One, the project-management component or “front end,” collects all of the sections of a spec into a single file. From there, a list of contents is generated, cross-referenced between sections in order to make it easier to catch errors.

When the user clicks on a particular section, the software launches the section editor. When the time comes to print the spec, it forces that spec into a consistent format and layout.

That’s important, Thornber said, because “you’re developing a legal document. It’s not something that has a lot of graphics and fonts and font sizes and colours. It’s a legal document, so it has to be something that’s easily defended in court.” All this makes writing a spec quicker and easier than simply using Word and a database, Thornber said, because that involves much more manual formatting and editing. “We’ve found through studies that you can generate a spec two to three times faster with NMS Edit than by using Word,” he said.

The result is that it has achieved good market penetration, and is used in many schools as well as by both public- and private-sector organizations, and by independent spec writers.

Since nothing stands still in this world, there are upgrades in the offing.

“The next thing will be to allow users to plug other word processors (than Word) into the system. We’ll be bringing in an editor that is much more like Word than the one we have now. But we’d like to bring in a WordPerfect-like editor . . . so the user has a choice of editing environment.” That is likely to be available sometime next year, he said.

Because NMS-Edit is not alone in the marketplace, this is a subject I’ll come back to another time, after I’ve had a chance to talk to more people. Until then, though, you can find out more about NMS-Edit by pointing your browser at www.innovative.ca

And if you’re not a spec writer and just want to know more about the National Master Specification and how it works, there’s plenty of information available from Public Works and Government Services Canada, under whose umbrella the NMS exists.

To find it, go to www.pwgsc.gc.ca/nms then click on ‘Documents.’

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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