Think of your group’s final report as an extension of the project proposal you did in M E3910?. You are welcome to choose a format you feel is appropriate, but I wanted to give you the option to use the template I used in the masters level design course at Stanford University (M E310? taught by Mark Cutkosky and Larry Liefer). You’ll notice that the examples refer to M E310? in them, the instructions come from the 2nd quarter of the course (M E310b?), and the example from the VW and KTH teams are from the 1st quarter of the course (M E310a?). Your reports may have a little more content than the VW and KTH examples because these teams had only been working on their projects for approximately 5 weeks at the time the reports were written.
Unzip the above file, and take a look at the file. You’ll notice that there’s a zip’d .exe file. Unzip it and double click the .exe file in the folder in which you will be creating the report. This will create a word template that is broken into 10 different “.doc” files. You’ll add your content to files 1–9 which will be “compiled” into the master document, “00Master.doc”. You can compile by doing a “print preview” of the “00Master.doc”. This will open up all the subdocuments and pull the content from them and create a table of contents. Having your report broken up into several files has the general advantage that as you report grows in size, you be less likely to crash MS Word.
For details about how to fix various issues with the document, see the list below.
- What should go in the report. This file will tell you what goes in each of the sections of your report.
- Some examples of design reports from ME310 at Stanford University (class link)
How to fix issues when compiling the Word Template
Some of you have noticed that you might have some broke links in the table of contents (TOC)for the page numbers, or if you’ve added headings sometimes these won’t automatically appear in the TOC. To fix this, right-click on the TOC and select “update field”, and you should see the TOC update.
“update field” can also fix a number of other link issues you might be having.
The other issue that I’ve seen that sometimes happens in the master document is the section numbers start counting over again from 1. If this is the case, simply right-click the main heading (the one that starts over at “1. “) and select “bullets and numbering”. When this menu comes up, make sure that “outlined numbered” tab is selected and the format in the lower-right is selected (the one with a period after the numbers). Then make sure that “Continue previous list” is selected (and not “Restart numbering”).
Let me know if you have general questions, I can put together a FAQ page. --wil