Bill Template and Bill Saving

PLEASE READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS!

Last year, many bills came in with the headers as images pasted in to the top of bills (see “bad example” enclosed.) This practice came from a time when all of the information added by the state office to the header was done by hand. PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW YOUR DELEGATES TO FORMAT BILLS THIS WAY ANY LONGER! In an attempt to make the Secretary of State’s office run more smoothly, all bills are handled digitally. If the header is an image, we cannot type in the additional needed information!

I have enclosed a bill template you can email to your students or save to a floppy disk, flash drive, or to a classroom or lab computer for them. The gray areas you see on the template are areas the students will click on and type to fill in. You will see where the body of the bill will go…in addition, the page numbering is set up correctly for the students! (In the past, many students have incorrectly numbered the lines, most often by typing in a line number at the beginning of each line after they were done with the bill… you can imagine the mess that creates when the SOS office is trying to type in revisions!)

When the bill is finished, it will look like the “good example” enclosed.

Naming the files

PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW ABOUT HOW TO NAME YOUR STUDENTS’ FILES BEFORE EMAILING THEM TO ME AS A GROUP!

It will help immeasurably if you could email me all of the bills for your delegation as a batch. Last year, I got tons of bills sent to me by students, many of which had not been previewed by an adult, and many of which were formatted incorrectly (or were very poor quality). You can attach several files to one email – and there will be a better chance they will get to me previewed by you!

Please have your students follow the following naming conventions:

Delegation_last_first_typeoffile for example: butte_smith_john_bill or milescity_jones_cindy_positionpaper

If a student sends you a file that is not named correctly, please change it before sending it to me. You can do this by opening the file (to preview it) and then going to file and down to “save as” and naming it correctly. If you have already previewed it, you can just point at the file and right click and rename the file.

Once you have all of your students’ bills saved in one place, you can attach them all to an email and send them to me. I will send you confirmation back telling you the files names of all bills I received. If you do not feel comfortable sending them this way, please save them all to a floppy or CD and mail them to me.