Few of us can avoid the chore of writing up reports. If,
like Dr Know, you started your working life in the pre-desktop
computer age, you probably have less than pleasant memories of
typewriters, carbon paper, Tippex and assorted frustrations.
These days, Microsoft Word and other
mainstream word processors offer many tools to help us write decentlooking
reports. Where would we be without spelling checkers, grammar checkers,
style templates, headers and footers, automatic page numbering
and the ability to insert symbols, tables, charts and illustrations
into our documents with a couple of mouse clicks? Word and WordPerfect
even have a built-in equation editor - or you can upgrade to the
excellent MathType (www.mathtype.co.uk).
If you use Mathcad (mathcad.adeptscience.co.uk),
a longtime favourite of Dr Know, for your design calculations,
you may well use that to prepare your reports. As well as powerful
tools for engineering calculations, Mathcad offers pretty competent
document preparation features, making it a sort of mathsaware word
processor. If your organisation has adopted the Mathcad Enterprise
standard, its advanced knowledge management tools with a built-in
audit trail will ensure that all your work and associated files
are retained, archived and easily retrieved. If you use a Windows
word processor
for writing your reports, however, you may find it a bit more difficult
tomanage all the notes, files and graphics that underpin your work.
Wouldn’t it be nice to manage,
reference and index all your design drawings, calculations, programs
and notes from within MS Word -a sort of personal knowledge management
system?
Most scientific and other researchers use reference
management software, sometimes known as “Personal
Bibliographic Managers” (PBMs),
to search Internet reference libraries for the references they need
to cite when writing research papers and dissertations, and format
their bibliographies. The best-known software in this category is
EndNote (www.endnote.co.uk). Although we design engineers don’t
often need to include literature references in our reports, EndNote
offers other capabilities that can be very useful indeed. Foremost
among these is the ability to produce lists of figures, automatically.
EndNote works by creating a database of references,
with fields for all the information you need to store (author,
keyword, date etc). You can also embed graphs, images and other
files in the image field of any EndNote reference, and these appear
as thumbnails within the reference. An associated field allows
you to add a caption.
As well as charts, tables, equations, chemical structures,
design sketches and other graphic files, you can insert files from
any modern Windows application - an Excel workbook, an AutoCAD
design, a Mathcad document or a MATLAB model, for example, or a
PDF document or text file. In your report, EndNote can number them
and order the figure list, and revise the list and numbering when
you insert another.
The EndNote library attaches itself to your Word
document, so that you have an immediate reference to the essential
information about the source files - date, notes, background information
and more. With this source material embedded in, or linked to,
your document, all your work is catalogued and retrievable within
your report. EndNote is the most popular PBM but there are others
you might want to take a look at, such as Reference Manager (www.refman.co.uk),
Biblioscape (www.biblioscape.com), Papyrus (www.researchsoftwaredesign.com),
ProCite (www.procite.co.uk) and Citation (www.citationonline.net).
Dr Know's recommended download is the EndNote 30 day trial
version - download yours today.