Creating Reports in MS-Word

The material below will show you how to create a professional report in MS-Word that includes spatial information.

Introduction

Microsoft Word is the most popular software application for creating office documents within the United States.

Here is an example of a simple report created in MS-Word with comments to help you create a similar report.

Data

Below is a sample dataset that can be used for this lab or you can use your own data.

Data (zip file)

Selecting a Style

Being your report with a concise title that gives the purpose of the report and the name of the location of interest. Then, select the title with your mouse and select the "Title" style from the "Home" tab. Just below the title type your name and the current date. Select this new text and then select the "Subtitle" style.

Using styles will give the elements in your documents a standard set of font characteristics. More importantly, later on you can try different overall styles and they will be applied to your entire document. Using the appropriate styles for the content of your report will also allow help disabled individuals use automatic document readers to read your report.

1. Now type "Abstract", select this text and select the "Heading 1" style. Abstracts, also called "Executive Summaries", are short summaries of the entire report. Abstracts only appear in relatively long documents and are written after the entire document has been completed.
2. Type "Introduction" and again, select the "Heading 1" style. The "Abstract" and "Introduction" are sections within your overall document. Add section headings for "Methods", "Results", "Conclusion", "Acknowledgments", and "Bibliography".
3. Click on the "DESIGN" tab in MS-Word and then try some of the different "Styles" for your document.

The sections below will lead you through creating the rest of the material.

Content

Front Matter

The front matter includes a title, your name as the author, and the date the report was written. A good title for a GIS report contains the subject and the location of the study such as "Predicting the Habitat of Tamarisk (Tamarix)in the United States of America" or "Mapping the Extent of English Ivy (Hedera helix) in Redwood National Park".

Abstract

Don't write the abstract yet! Instead, write it after the rest of your report is completed. The abstract should contain at least one sentence that summarizes each section in the report from the Introduction to the Conclusion.

Introduction

The introduction introduces your topic to the reader, establishes the background for your methods, and poses your objectives, goals, or hypothesis. All statements of fact (i.e. "grizzly bears once inhabitant most of the Western Continental United States but are now limited to small geographic regions) need to be accompanied by a citation for the source of the fact. Citations need to appear in the "Bibliography/Reference" section and it is easiest to do this as you create the introduction.

• Provide any background needed to inform the reader of your topic
• Provide background to support the methods you'll be using
• End with a statement of the objective/goals/hypothesis that the study will attain or provide.

Methods

The methods section describes the steps that were used to conduct the research. The content of this section varies with each report but can include:

1. Description of the study site, with a map if needed
2. How data was collected including manufacturer and model of equipment used
3. How the data was qualified for the study
4. The analysis methods that were used along with the manufacture and version of any software. Equations should be created with the MS-Word equation editor.
5. The methods for final production of the products including this report and data sets
   

There should be enough information for someone else, with the same level of skill, to recreate your study but you do not need to include specific steps within a software package. In other words, you don't need to state "I selected the Buffer tool in ArcMap and set the buffer distance to 10 meters", insetad, "I buffered the data to 10 meter" is fine).

Results

The results section contains what was discovered during the study. This often includes maps showing the results and tables of figures from analysis. Results should start with prose and just describe the results and not discuss or interpret them. Typically each paragraph will describe some results and include references to figures and/or tables. Then the figure or table follows the paragraph. This is repeated for all the results. Changes to the methods that occurred during the study should be included in results.

Conclusion and/or Discussion

All documents should have a "Discussion" and/or a "Conclusion" section. Longer reports will contain both. Technically the discussion contains concerns about the methods and results, potential areas for improvements, and the wider ramifications of the results. the first sentence of the conclusion should state the major results of the study followed by the next steps the researcher feels should be taken to improve or expand upon the results.

Acknowledgments

This is an optional section but should be added if the sponsors of the report are not part of the organization that created the report or if data and other work were contributed by folks not mentioned as authors. This should include field personnel and anyone who helped in the preparation of the data and/or report. Simply thank each person or organization that contributed and their contribution to the report.

Data sources should be acknowledged here unless mentioned elsewhere in the document.

Bibliography/References

The entries in the Bibliography are referred to as "Citations" and most organizations have a standard format that they use for citations. For now, you can use a format that contains the following items in the order shown:

1. Primary authors last name followed by their initials. If there is no author, use a short name of the organization that created the material (e.g. "NASA").
2. Any secondary authors with their initials followed by their last name (i.e. reverse order of the primary author).
3. The year the material was published.
4. The full title of the material.
5. The source of the material. This is the publisher for books and articles and would be the full name of the organization that created the material for others (e.g. "National Aeronautics and Space Administration").
6. Detailed information o the location of the material. This would be a URL for web-based content, the chapter and page for books, and the volume and page numbers for articles.
7. You can also include a "Digital Object Identifier" (DOI) if available.

Citing Web pages

Today, we have to cite websites because much of our data comes from the Web. This is frowned upon in some journals. The alternative is to put the data source into the prose but this can make the text hard to read. Another option is to use a website like "tinyurl" to convert the URL to something smaller but this removes the name of the organization from the URL. Over the last few years, it does appear a standard format is emerging. Please use this format unless you have another one from a journal you prefer:

Title of home page. Date of publication. Edition. Place of publication: publisher; [date updated; date accessed]. URL.

• Title of home page: required
• Date of publication: optional, If not available, use the current year.
• Edition: optional
• Place of publication: optional
• Publisher:required. Should be the organization sponsoring the web site, not the one that maintains the website.
• Date updated: optional
• Date accessed: required
• URL: required. A reader should be able to click on the link and go to the web page you took information (or data) from.

You would then cite the web page in your text as (Title of Homepage, Year of publication). The title should be abbreviated to just a few words.

Examples include:

• Humboldt County GIS Data Download. Humboldt County; [9/5/2017]. http://www.humboldtgov.org/276/GIS-Data-Download
• WorldClim - Global Climate Data. WorldClim; [9/5/2017]. http://worldclim.org/version2.
• EarthExplorer. U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey. [7/31/2017, 9/5/2017]. https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/.

These would be referenced as:

I used the Humboldt County Boundary (Humboldt County, 2017) to crop the LandSat data from March of 2017 (EarthExplorer, 2017) and the WorldClim Bio1 layer (WorldClim, 2017).

Adding Maps to MS-Word

There are many problems that can crop up when putting maps into MS-Word. If you follow these steps, your maps will look good and will not stop you from editing the rest of your document. Make sure you export the map from the GIS application at 300dpi or higher resolution. JPEG is a good file format for final maps as it will compress the image somwhat and we don't need the map to be georeferenced when we insert it into MS-Word. If you use JPEG, make sure to se the quality to maximum or JPEG will throw away data to compress the image more.

The image below was exported from ArcMap and then scaled down to fit on this web page. We can't show you a 600dpi map on the web because the screen will not support it. However, if you click on the map, you'll see just how detailed the map it. If you follow these steps your maps will look great when you print them from MS-Word.

Bringing the Map into MS-Word

1. In MS-Word, click in the report on the line you want the image to appear on.
2. Click on the "Insert" tab.
3. Click on "Picture".
4. Navigate to the file you exported from ArcMap and click "Insert".
5. The map image should appear in MS-Word and it should look really nice.
6. Next, right click on the image, drag to "Wrap Text", and make sure "In Line with Text" is selected. This will treat the image as a large character. You'll need to add "returns" (clicking "enter" on your keyboard) before and after the image but the image will move with the text making it much easier to edit your documents.
7. Finally, right after the image, hit return and type a caption that starts with "Figure X." where "X" is the number of the figure within your document, starting with 1.

Sometimes, the map elements within ArcGIS are just not high enough quality or flexible enough for final maps. One way around this is to make some of the map elements in ArcGIS and then use the steps above to bring the pieces into MS-PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator, or another graphics art package. Then, you can add a rich variety of elements to your maps and have great control over their placement. Typically for this, you will want to add the neat lines in PowerPoint rather than in ArcGIS. Then, you can paste the final image into MS-Word as we did before.

Adding Tables

You can add tables to MS-Word from the "Insert" tab. then, you can just type information into the table.

If you want to bring tables in from Excel you just want to avoid pasting them as "Objects". Instead, create the table in MS-Word and then copy and pate the contents of the table into MS-Word. This works best if you insert a table that has the same number of rows and columns as the spreadsheet. Then, copy the entire spreadsheet to the clipboard, select all the rows and columns in the table in MS-Word, and then paste the contents of the spreadsheet into the table. Then, you can use the "Design" tab to change the borders and background of the table.

Another approach that appears to work in Office 365 is to:

1. Copy and paste the section of data from MS-Excel into MS-Word
2. Right click in the “+” in the upper left of the table
3. Select “Auto Fit -> Auto Fit to Window”
4. Select a professional looking “Design” from the tab bar

Another difference is that the caption for a table is typically above the table and starts with "Table X." where X is the order of the tables in the document from 1.