Hi all,

I remember being told ages ago about a software or plug-in or something similar that makes formatting large reports and documents much easier than in Word – ie aligning all the images, figures and tables, sorting the referencing/figuring etc out?

Anyone know what it might have been? Often spend a lot of time faffing around with getting images to fit onto a page, breaking up paragraphs etc etc, so would be really handy to find this for my dissertation!

Ta,
Duane.

LaTex is the go-to for a lot of academics for formatting and type setting large documents.

I’m not a fan personally and just used word for my 15000 word dissertation.

Thanks, will check it out. What don’t you like about it?

It just seemed like to much of a faff for me. I’ve used it the past and just prefer the WYSISYG style of editing that you get in Word.

I do enough coding when I’m writing software, I can do without it when I’m writing documents 😛

It really depends on what the content of your report is I reckon. For stuff where you’ve got any formulae to display it’s hard to beat.

Word can actually do a pretty good job of text layout once you learn how to use styles, templates and cross-referencing properly.

For consistency of image alignment, resizing etc that styles won’t handle it is pretty easy to learn enough VBA through googling to get Word to (for example) go through all images in a document and centre them / insert a page break before/after / whatever you want really. If there is a good plugin that automates all this it is probably just some VBA someone has packaged up. I had some nice VBA a few years ago that would ask for a folder and then import each picture in that folder into a three-cell-wide table in a Word document, resizing them automatically. Hardly cutting-edge programming but saved us huge amounts of repetitive work.

Latex does a good job too but has (IME) a steeper learning curve.Probably worth learning for a PhD dissertation or something with formulae, but if your main issues are paragraph breaks and image formatting I would just learn to use styles in Word.

I used LaTeX for my PhD in Chemistry and it did a fantastic job, but we did have a DocumentType ‘Thesis’. I still had to import PDFs of images to include in the final postscript.

Formulae etc. were brilliant once you’d worked out the structure of the commands.

I use software called Monarch which is great for getting a preset layout into a txt or Excel format. Takes a bit to create template models for the specific data you want to drag out of yours reports, but once models done it very quick .

Use it to take set fields from large Age of debt reports with 140000 records , also take bots and pics from Invoice files.

Very easy to set up and use.

It’s made by Datawatch

Isn’t monarch for reports->structured data whereas OP is looking for report creation software?

Anyway, having last used Monarch about 12 years ago I am both pleased and appalled to see it is still I use, as I had assumed modern systems made it easier to get structured data via ODBC and other interfaces, so I guess there are a number of legacy systems that still have fixed format reports. When Monarch failed, it was time to bust out the AWK handbook…..

Personally I use LaTex as it is excellent for formatting formulae (kind of useful when your doing a maths degree) and will produce an great looking document, but will take a while to learn and can be incredibly frustrating. So maybe not easier than word but if your report contains any formulae (IMO) it would be hard to recommend anything else.

Edit: LaTeX also lacks a spell check. Not sure if that will bother you but thought I might as well mention it.

Thanks guys. Think I’ll stick with Word and get fully involved with styles, auto figuring etc etc.

Ta.

By the time I got to the end of my thesis, I found all of the good stuff that Word / OpenOffice can do in formatting a large document eg automatic paragraph numbering, automatic indexing, referencing etc etc. I wish I’d known more about it before I started to take real advantage of it.
Word can do it all and more – just some learning and prep. At least I’ll know for next time (nooooooooooooooo).

Word can do it all and more – just some learning and prep. At least I’ll know for next time

The biggest part really, look up all the things TooTall has said, decide what you want and like and set it up properly from day 1.

Most of the time working with word reports in my past experience was due to people setting up rubbish templates (half the numbering turned out to be static not auto etc. mismatched heading styles and all that. Most people use word processors as glorified typewriters.

If you are collaborating or getting others to review then make them use comments/track changes inserting text in pink is not the same and it will be met dealt with by sending this guy round

I probably produce a couple of 50,000+ word documents every year for my projects and I just use msWord. The key is to be rigorous about styles and to not worry too much about the appearance/ layout until you’ve got the main part of the document together.
Use Figure/ Table auto numbering and Reference them in main text, then you don’t have to spend days making sure they’re correct unlike some of my colleagues.
I have some rules for how I work which includes – no hanging para/ sentences, a section always starts on a new page, sub heading on a new column etc.