Tina’s Presentation on Final Report

• what to turn in
  • Please just turn in one hardcopy your complete report to your advisor by 5pm on Monday December 10th, 2007.
  • Also post a PDF version of your report to your Wiki Site? if you have one (and optionally a zipped MS Word version to the wiki, if it fits). This can be password protected if you request.
    • Or let your TA know you don’t have a wiki site and they can post your report. This can be password protected if you request.
  • Email a PDF of your report to your advisor, Tina, and your class TA by 5pm on Monday December 10th, 2007.

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.

Also you’ll notice that I have changed the organization of section 3 on customer needs and section 5 on specifications to more closely match what Ulrich and Eppinger outline. I also am suggesting that you organize section 4 on design development according the major subsystems of your project as discussed in our “Product Architecture” Lecture

The main sections of the report are

• Title Page

1. Front Matter (Executive Summary & Table of Contents)
   • (Table of contents will automatically generate if you use the provided template)
2. Context (Team, etc…) (You’ll do a draft of this section in Oct.)
3. Design Requirements (You’ll do a draft of this section in Nov.)
4. Outline of Design Development (the stuff you’ve been doing towards your project)
   • Suitable material for this section
     • Brainstorming
     • Benchmarking
     • Design Refinement
     • Design Trades
     • Calculations and simulation results
     • Final Designs (Labeled solid model renderings would be good for this section — put drawings in the appendix)
   • Include this type of material for all major components/assemblies in your project
5. Design Specifications (You’ll do a draft of this section in Nov.)
6. Preliminary Recommendations (this will be brief this semester, but next semester this will read like a future work or suggested refinements and/or lessons learned
7. Project Planning (Gantt & Budget items and explanation of each, DSM or PERT charts could also go here.)
8. Reference Materials (optional for Fall 2007) (Sources for information, materials, equipments…)
9. Appendices (optional for Fall 2007)(Drawings, data…)
   The main thing that you will not be required to do in the fall is the section on documentation of the design development, which many of you may not get very far on considering you will only really start to focus on development about 1/2 way through ME 4000. I do recommend, however, that you do document your work through lots of digital pictures, sketches, screen shots, and design notebooks. This will greatly simplify your final document preparation in ME 4010 and will also provide a paper trail if your work turns out to be patentable.

Template Download

• Word Report Template, Instructions, and Examples (~1.6 MB) If you chose to use this template, see the instructions below instructions and for how to modify this template to include the sections you have already written (11/15) -Will?

Final Report Example from ME 4000 Fall 2005

Here is an example of a good report from last year.

• Precision Kiting Final Report - Fall 2005

Note that we are doing things a little differently that this example this year. You’ll notice that I have changed the organization of section 3 on customer needs and section 5 on specifications to more closely match what Ulrich and Eppinger outline. I also am suggesting that you organize section 4 on design development according the major subsystems of your project as discussed in our “Product Architecture” Lecture

Placing template in directory

The first thing you must do after you download the above zip template is decide which directory you will work in. This will be important once we have modified the “master” document with the hyperlinks to your section documents (e.g., design requirements section).

The way the document template works is that files associated with the title page through the appendix are linked from the “00Master.doc” file. So the hyperlinks in the “00Master.doc” file are simply looking for files at the address specified in each respective link. By default, these hyperlink addresses will be associated with the current directory where the “00Master.doc” file is located and if you move that entire directoy, the hyperlinks will be updated to reflect this change (which is exactly what you want). Further instructions follow directly below:

Step-by-Step instructions

1. Download the above zip file and unzip
2. Create a directory somewhere on your computer where you intend to work on your final report
3. Double click on the Final+Report+template.exe
4. Browse to the location of folder you created two steps above
   1. Click OK
5. Make a backup copy of the “00Master.doc” file
6. Copy your files that you’ve done for your “context”, “design requirements”, and “design specifications” to the into the directory where you unzipped the contents of Final+Report+template.exe and make sure they are named “2Context.doc”, “3DesignRequirements.doc”, and “5DesignSpecifications.doc”, respectively (yes, I meant to number the design specifications file starting with 5 — this is to agree with the link address in 00Master.doc). You may have to delete or overwrite the default files that you just unzipped. The names of these files are important since the hyperlinks are looking for these exact file names in the directory that the template files were unzipped into

7. Download Sections 0, 1, 4, and 6-9 (which I have edited to include header info for M E4000?)
   • unzip these and copy the files over into the same directory where you just unzipped the contents of Final+Report+template.exe (overwrite old files).

8. Open the “00Master.doc” file by double clicking onto it (leaving your backup version untouched, so that you can start over if necessary)
   1. scroll down and examine that all the hyperlinks are valid (i.e., they don’t show “errors”).
      1. If there are links, it’s probably because it is looking for a file in the current directory that does not exist. If so, close the “00Master.doc” file, and place the missing file in the same directory as the “00Master.doc” file and start again by opening the “00Master.doc” file.
9. After you have found all your hyperlinks to be valid, simply click the “print preview” icon (which should be next to the “printer” icon.
   1. click “yes” to allow Word to open “subdocuments”
10. You should now see the “00Master.doc” document populate itself with the contents of all the references sub-files
    1. 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.

Other Reference Examples and Info from Stanford

• 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)

Note that we are doing things a little differently that this example this year. You’ll notice that I have changed the organization of section 3 on customer needs and section 5 on specifications to more closely match what Ulrich and Eppinger outline. I also am suggesting that you organize section 4 on design development according the major subsystems of your project as discussed in our “Product Architecture” Lecture

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 or have other issues. If this is the case, simply right-click the heading number (the one that starts over at “1. “ or that has some other issue) 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”). Alternatively (to fix stubborn numbering problems), while in the “bullets and numbering” window, you can click “customize” then then change the “start at” number to the appropriate number or make changes in the “number format field”. This 2nd method is also shown step-by-step below

To over-ride section numbers

1. “right click” the heading numbers you want to modify
2. select “bullets and numbering” (and override the numbering scheme)
3. click “customize”
4. make changes to all but the last number in the heanding number in the “number format field” (e.g., if you have 2.4.3 and it should read 2.5.1, make the change to the 4 here)
5. change the last number in the “start at” field (e.g., if you have 2.4.3 and it should read 2.5.1, make the change to the 3 to a 1 here)
6. click OK
7. click OK

Let me know if you have general questions, I can put together a FAQ page. --Will?