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Professional bill format in word for Quality Assurance

have you ever wondered how to get a professional looking report written in word well that's what we're going to go through today my name's chris and i like to share on this channel the sorts of tools and experience that i've learned as being an engineer and a consultant to help anyone work through complex problems that they might face in the workplace so for example what i've put together here is a professional looking report in word that anyone can use as a template it gives you the basic building blocks of putting together a professional looking report that can be submitted as part of submitted to a client or to other stakeholders for review comment update and to look professional because if you submit a professional looking report people are less likely to question the content inside it one of the first lessons i was taught so whether that's right or not please let me know in the comments below so i'm going to run through how i got set up with these headings how i set up the headers and footers how i put this picture and title together i'm going to go through all of that in this video so feel free to follow along step by step so i've brought up here the basics of what we're going to do today we've got an introduction section we've got an about us we've got the purpose of this report and the methodology of how we're going to meet it so we're going to what i'm going to take you through is how to define the minimum components of a professional report the paragraphs the headings the headers and the footers the cover page table of contents lists and figures and tables okay so the first thing we're going to do is create a new style for these paragraphs click click the more button next to the styles and create a new style now it's important to use styles to do this in word so that you can apply the style everywhere it's important one of the key things i find that one of the key mistakes i find that junior consultants make is to use these buttons over here by keeping a consistent style throughout your writing throughout your report it really brings forth the professionalism in the document so people are less likely to question the contents if everything looks neat and professional so even if you don't agree with the style the in the report template yeah and you can change that but make sure you change it for the whole report i'd highly recommend not using any of these buttons over here don't use any of the font or paragraph buttons to change there is one exception under paragraph but we'll get to that later on so our style so we set up the styles first for each of these things and then we apply those styles in the right spot so to set up the style for paragraphs we're going to call it body and click modify and then style type should be for uh we'll leave it as linked a style based on now we want to set the because the body is going to be the base of our report we want to change it to no style and then style for the following paragraph so after you press the return key at this and at the end of the paragraph it will this is the box that says what the next style should be so it helps you when you're typing and the next style should be body because after a body paragraph typically you have another body paragraph you can change that though uh this is important for headings which we'll get to later so uh after that we're going to set the font for our body style just to be different uh i'm going to set it to arial even though that's not very different just to have something that's different from microsoft word's default aerial is quite a basic font there's no real argument about it so i'll just put arial in click ok and then the next one we're going to do is set the paragraph after before and after the spacing for the paragraph i like to use a little bit less spacing afterwards and a little bit more before we leave the line spacing at 1.08 it just allows a little bit of readability between the lines and there's no indentation for this now some of the important ones that we can work with later on are here under line and page breaks but we'll stick with but for the base style we'll stick with it like this so that's our para that should be our paragraphs done and now body should come up here at the top so we can format all of our body as on the body format you can see it starts to change the font and move things around a bit so body body and body now the things i've left alone here are going to be our headings so we're going to define first of all we want our headings to appear in the table of contents so we want our headings to have this one dot for example and then 1.1 and so forth so the way to do that is to use the list style so to come up to the multi-level list here define new multi-level list and if you ever need to change in the future you still click the define new button which i found a bit strange so define new multi-level list and you go to number one and because this is the top one you just leave it as that one dot now click the more button to bring over where to link it to in the to link it to the heading style because we want our multi-level list to be linked to our headings so the link level to style so level one should link to heading one okay and then level two should link to heading two and then level three should link to heading three okay good now i this is still set up from what the example i just put together but it's important for this number format so entering the number format for heading 1 it's fine it's fine as one dot for heading 2 what it looks what it might look like to you something like this just having an a or a b there so simply remove that and then the first step is to add in the number for this level so numbers one two and three and then put a dot in front of it like that and then go include from level one so that would be one dot one if we were in chapter two it would be 2.1 then we'd repeat the same process for level three so in this case we do for this level it's one and then we put in a dot then we put in level two so we're working backwards oops then we put in level two and then we put in a dot go back and we put in level one so 1.1.1 okay then we want to change our now on your document you might have different numbers here for the indent and alignment so i like to keep them all aligned all the numbers aligned on the left and so the way i've done that is to keep the first one at zero the second one at 1.27 centimeters and the third one at 1.27 as well and then to have the text aligned at 0.63 so i'll show you that one in a second when we hit ok now that is actually heading two okay and this is heading one here so you see one and 1.1 now i don't actually like the way that that's offset from the left so because we've set the list already a zero it might be that this style is wrong over here and i don't like the color off on either so we're going to change this style to it so it says based on normal that would change it to format font and then change to arial because i wanted all my things as aerial now this is heading one i'm going to change it to black as well so i'm going to make it bold and a bit bigger too because we really want our heading ones to stand out so click okay and now one thing i like to do is start every heading one on a new page so i'm going to go back to paragraph here line and page breaks and then hit page break before so every time we put a heading 1 into the document it will put a page break before it so every heading 1 will start on a new page and click ok now we're going to take a look at the paragraph again to see why it's offset so far from the left and first line is this no so it should just be hanging because if it runs over then it should hang by that much i also like to have a lot of space after my heading ones so i'm going to increase this quite a bit to 24 there we go okay so that should yes realign it make it nice and big and bold and over on the left now let's do the same for heading two oops heading make sure we select this one modify heading two i highly recommend using these styles for everything you do if there isn't a style that you want to apply and you're tempted to click these buttons make a style instead so follow along some of the instructions this video if you're curious on how to make a style so heading 2 our style is going to be based on heading 1 the following paragraph should be normal yeah it should be body actually it should be body then we click format fonts and we change it to black or we change it to arial we're still going to have it bold but we're going to have it a bit smaller let's say 16 and we change it to automatic okay and then we're going to look at the paragraph again to make sure it's left aligned now like i said i want everything over on the left and that hanging we put in a little bit before and a bit afterwards as well okay oops i forgot that by setting it to so you can see it's gone over to the next page by setting it to be based on heading one it's inherited the styles from heading one that haven't been overwritten and in this case that page break before setting that i set has been uh inherited so we come back here format paragraph line and page breaks and untick page break before so now heading 2 won't be on a new page there is a actually a little there's a lot of space here so i might come back to whoops what have i done so i might come back to heading one uh and the first level of heading and actually remove some of that space i think it's a little bit too much so i want to change paragraph and this spacing before we're going to set that down back to 12 okay so now we can apply heading the second level of heading there this can actually be its own new one there and just to show you what heading 2 and heading 3 look like so we apply heading 2 there and then heading 3 will jump like that but what we're going to do this is size 11. so what we're going to do is set up i like to have a heading that maybe has a section across it i'll show you how to do a new line a line border for the heading so heading three is going to be based on heading two uh we're going to change the font again you only have to do this once uh so if you set up a new report template for your business or your company your employer or whichever task you want to report on say this project then you only have to set this up once and you're set after that so i'm going to change this to size 11 just to match the normal text size but i'm going to leave it as bold i'm going to change it back to black and then click ok and then we want it over on the left again because i don't like it indented like that so we set that to 0 and we do have some spacing before and after as well okay because the way i like to use heading threes is let's type in some paragraph texts paragraph text actually i think the heading 3 looks a bit small so let's strike let's try to strike a balance here and change it to let's make it a little bit bigger let's say 14 and also i'll make it italic as well and like i said i'm going to try putting a line above the top so you do that by coming to border and then we want to define the top border so i don't know what's taking so long below so we define the top border there and click ok and now that puts a line above heading 3 there okay so now we can type in some detail here so if we go and ctrl p and you can see what that looks like without the paragraph marks that i've got on it's starting to look a little bit like a professional report that that line probably isn't the best let's see if we can add a little bit of space in front of that line so how do we do that we can try paragraph and we can put some more space before let's try that nope okay undo we can do modify and we'll try the border again border and what options do we have width applied to paragraph okay options maybe in here top ah okay so we can increase the space from the top let's make it let's make it three point and click okay so that should be half the space okay done there we go that's added a little more space there so that looks a little bit nicer now what we're going to do is add a so we've done paragraphs and headings let's do headers and footers so in the footer come over here to [Music] layout no insert no design i can't remember where footers are come over here to okay so you come over here to insert and then footer and we just want to edit the footer because we're going to define everything ourselves so once that pops up it should bring us to the footer and we're going to i like everything right aligned for the bottom footer and we're going to put in the page number first so page number okay so we're going to come up to the quick parts and insert quick parts instead of the page number because it gives us a bit more control so we're going to insert a field and we're going to come down to page finding here page number page yep there we go and select this one two three now this will give us the page number there we're going to we're going to give the current page out of the total pages so we go again to quick parts field and select now i'm actually going to select the section page because when it comes to section the highest no the total section pages because when it comes to putting in the cover page and the table of contents we put them in a different section of the document so that we can uh just count the number of pages that are actual contents in the document so put those put that in here it's still two because there are only two pages in our section okay now another i'll get to actually i'll show you that later on um we'll come back to fix this up after we've put in the cover page and the table of contents so after the page we want to put in a reference number uh every good report good quality control good document management should have a reference number so reference number is engineer upgrade reports zero zero zero one okay and we should also put in some sort of dates to make it look good now i'm recording this in september so when we put in i'm actually going to do it by in the practice run i did do it by this date and time but it didn't look so good so make so i do quick parts field because i just want month and year so come down to dates and this gives you the option to format if you just do this insert date and time you don't get the option to format so select september 20 and because it's 2020 that sounds a bit ambiguous it doesn't sound right so i'm going to put in all four digits for the year september 2020 there we go so that's the bottom of our report done let's come up to the header and define the header again i like to have this be right aligned so i like to have this be right aligned and i like to put in if i had a logo ready for if i had a logo in the right format i could put it on here but my logo currently isn't in the right format for work it's not it's only suitable for the web so i'm just going to call it engineered upgrade so for the name of the organization and then we're going to put in the title of this report as well so insert alignment tab rights okay and this is introduction to professional reports so the title of this report now you can style those actually i might make it a little bit smaller the text now i'm going to break my rule and not use the styles you can set up a style for for the header and footer but i'm just going to be quick and cheap today and set it to ariel because they're only set uh once twice in the whole thing so not not so bad but i do recommend that if you're going to do this take the time to set up a style for your header and footer it's not that bad okay and again we set this to oh i feel so dirty doing this i feel so dirty uh setting the st setting the font and text size by this but uh i'll be here all night if you want me to set these in the uh in the video for you as well so okay uh right now let's now what was next in our list so we've done our paragraphs done headings headers and footers let's set up a cover page so cover pages on its own so new page now cover page should be more like the rest of the report should be in its own sections the cover page should be a separate section from the rest of the report so word defines sections by applying these say styles headers and footers and things to different sections so we click on this layout and then breaks and insert a new page station section break just fix up the pages there then we can start working on our title page in this section and i'll show you why that's important in a minute when it comes to setting the header and footer because at the moment it doesn't look so great to have this reference information things on the cover page the cover page sells your report to the executives so cover page has to be nice clean bring the point across what we're going to do is define our title style and i'm really only doing this because word had the styles already because i should have done it for the header and footer as well so we'll put in our title and we say professional reports by engineered upgrade and we're going to put in we're going to set this as the title style now i'm going to change this because i still don't like the calibri format i'm going to modify this right click and modify change the fonts so the font i'm going to use i want it to be arial again i want it to be i don't need it to be bold i'm going to make it a little bit bigger and i'm going to do small caps so this is where every letter is capitalized but the true capitals are a little bit bigger so we're going to set that and now we're going to set a subtitle you'll notice i like everything to be left aligned as well i don't like justified word i feel word doesn't have a very good engine for justified text sometimes you get too many gaps between the word so i always like to have my text left justified so i'm going to set up the subtitle as well which is going to be a guide to professional reports and again i don't like this subtitle i'm going to change it back to more of a default so i see what they've done here we're going to change the font to be a well we might need the color but we'll change it to ariel we'll leave it as regular we'll make it a little bit bigger so it stands out and what they've done is they've expanded the space between the characters we're going to change that back to normal and then we're going to i want to add a little bit of space just before so that the lines look a bit better aligned so we do add a little bit of space before okay there we go now the next thing that a cover page should have is a nice picture so i'm going to put in a insert a nice picture there should be some stock photos that we can use here to show off our professional report we're going to put in a nice stock photo once it loads up ah okay let's pick oh yes okay we've got some nice stock photos coming up here let's pick a collaboration let's do something nice like that now once it comes up my computer's struggling a bit to record the screen and to pick these photos so we'll insert our nice collaborative photo let's see how that looks now it might also be an idea to change the margins on the first page only and we can do that again thanks to these section breaks so if we change the marginal layout of the first page thanks to that section break we put in it won't change on other pages oh yeah that looks quite nice so we'll stick with that and what we'll do is i want this to dominate the page a bit more so you can see i've just hit print preview and you can see so you can see it without those tick marks and once it does come up it should yeah you can see here it looks a bit plain compared to the next page it doesn't really it doesn't really feel like much of a cover page so i'm going to decrease the margins on the side to make this feel more like a cover page i mean we do that under layout and we go to margins and we're going to change the first one to moderate instead so that will give us a bit more space now we can increase the size of our picture as well and that means it takes up more vertical space at the same time so there we go now it's up to you whether how often you want to do that uh it's up to you what sort of margins you want to use but i i feel it looks a bit nicer now having that picture just dominate if this were a report that i was handing in i'd pick pick a picture that's really relevant to really sell the report to the to the client stakeholder my manager anyone like that so the next thing in the report should be on the cover page it should be an understanding of who the report is from so we call it engineered upgrade upgrade and i like to put this on the um i might come back up here because i like to put this one on the subtitle you don't have to but i like to put this one on the subtitle style as well so i might change this subtitle style just to be all caps to make it stand out a bit more so we're going to go back and change this to all caps format fonts and change to all caps because the subtitle is really something that can show off a bit there so okay so we've got a guide to professional reports and i'm going to put this on the subtitle style as well excellent engineer upgrade and then engineered upgrade.com so some sort of contact detail i like to put in and the date as well september 2020. now another good idea here is to put in a bit of quality control information oh these should be these should be on the body despite not being in the body i believe that these should be on the body layer body style so i'll apply that okay and it can be a good idea to put in some quality control information such as who wrote the report such as the author the date the revision so we have author date revision and we'll do two of those and then i've seen a few different ways of doing this so it's up to you how you want to do it if you feel your report's going to be go through quite a few revisions it might be an idea to put to set up your own quality control page that really outlines the revisions you might see this at the start of some reports where they go through the changes since the last report and sometimes those changes because of the huge history of the document can be much bigger than the report itself i've seen that but this one's nice and simple so we're going to do date we're going to do author and we're going to do revision okay so word's offering me to save because it's looking like a complicated document and doesn't want me to lose it so these are our headings and we're going to count this upwards so we're going to call it the 30th of september 2020 the author has made chris and the revision is a draft okay so there's a bit of quality control information if you're interested in document control quality control and why these things are important hit subscribe because i'll be releasing a video about that shortly and how to do it how to do it simply because that's what this channel is about i don't want to throw things at you about iso standards or complicated document or quality control no things are simple on this channel and i'm going to share with you simple document control for normal people so hit subscribe if you're interested in that video so okay so some simple quality control there next we're going to do our table of contents so this is going to come after we're going to insert a new section break here to do our table of contents because i don't want to have that wider margin so we hit uh insert new section break on new page okay and now we insert our table of contents uh oops it's references for table of contents table of contents and we can just use any of the automatic tables because it's going to be nice and simple from the it's just going to come from the headings that we defined earlier so it's already pulled up our introduction our about us purpose of this report and methodology word calculates those automatically so the automatic table of contents is great i haven't found a reason to replace it except for this heading it is one of the defined styles and i like to replace it with something more appropriate to my report so i come down here to toc heading modify and we're going to change it to black and arial because that seems to be the theme we're going for today i would recommend being a little bit more creative than black and aerial for everything but it's really up to you if you have a color scheme for your business or a theme for your project then use that one instead so aerial and everything else is the same just change that oh and yeah change the font color as well so there we go nice and easy now what's missing here is some of the lists of tables or lists of figures so we'll get to that in a minute what i'm going to do first though is define the list style itself so we've got this list of items here and rather than defining each of the styles rather than clicking this button because remember i said clicking that button is wrong we're going to define a list style to use so the way to do that we'll pull up here because we've already got a list paragraph defined words just hidden it from us so come down here and put them all on the list paragraph style now that's not great there's no bullet point in the middle there and it's set to calibri again so we can right click on this and modify and we're going to set a bullet for us to use we're going to first of all change it back to arial so change this to arial and then okay so everything's back to ariel and now we're going to put a bullet in as well so we do that under numbering i think it was so put a at numbering and then bullets and define new bullet i'm going to pick a symbol to put in as a bullet one of the symbols defined here now this is the one i used last time but it's not that great it's too low so i'm going to pick a another symbol instead kind of stuck on the math symbols here so i'm not sure which one to pick i might just go with that same one again so we're going to use this symbol here click ok click ok and now that should put in a bullet there now if you don't like the way that's indented over you can shift it back to the left under paragraph but i'm just going to leave it now for simplicity the next item on our list is a figure so we're going to insert another figure and put a caption on it because captions are another style that you need to define yourself to make it a professional report so we're going to put in just another stock photo from this device i've done a lot of construction work in the past so i'm going to select this construction photo to put in so once that's popped in then we'll be able to set the caption for this photo and then you can see the caption style i actually like words default caption style so i'm not going to change it too much and then we're going to do the same with a table as well yep and then we go to insert caption and we call it uh oops this is a figure figure one construction okay so that's not a bad caption but we can make it a bit nicer so if we right click modify i don't like again calibri we're going to change it to arial i'm going to be lazy and just change it over here this time ariel otherwise it's okay and we're going to now insert a table to show the same thing for table captions just a simple table because in the body of a professional report tables should have captions so we're going to put in this table with right click and select insert caption and we call this uh no we call this table this is a table caption so first table okay so we've got the table in there and now we can add our list of tables and figures to the table of contents i've just noticed a mistake that we didn't want this footer showing up here so i'll go back and change that footer in a second but first before we do that we're going to go to references we're going to insert table of figures and here we select table of figures caption label table okay and now we do that again just insert figures change this to figure there as well and that should come up figure one construction okay there we go we've got our list of tables list the figures excellent so table of contents looking good remember one thing i said earlier was that we didn't want our footer here in the first section so what we do is change we come down here change it remove this link to previous and that should now be by itself and we can delete this information here okay then we delete that so now our report should be page one whoops i've made a mistake uh i forgot to de-link the forgot to d-link the this one as well so link to previous okay now we can delete the header and footer remember to d-link both the header and the footer from the previous so there we go so now on our front page there's no information about the document and there's none of that meta information about the document we're presenting exactly what's in the document we're going to keep it off our table of contents page as well and then we're going to put it in there so i'll hit print to show you what it's all like so i'll give you the print preview because that should be it so we should have now a professional looking report that has a cover page table of contents and some of the key elements of a report defined inside for you to use the styles so we go and look at the cover page we've got our professional report by engineer upgrade we've got some of the details a guide to professional reports a nice picture it's at a different margin as well we've got our table of contents you can jazz this up a little by moving the table of contents over and putting some graphics down the side if you're interested in how to do that please leave a comment below and i'll make another video about how to make professional reports look nicer and then we've got our introduction some nice headings paragraphs and we've got a list some figures and tables as well so the main elements of a professional report if you're interested in finding out more about when to use these sorts of things please hit subscribe i've got some videos coming up about how you can improve your professional writing by using lists figures and tables to really help explain things in a report so you're not just reading blocks of text all the time so hit subscribe and i'll be releasing that video shortly and hopefully i'll see you there