University of Waterloo

Faculty of Engineering

Your Descriptive and Concise Title with

Major Words Capitalized Containing 50
Characters or Less (Including Spaces)

Name of Your Employer

Address of your Employer
Prepared By
Your Name
ID 00000000
2A Department of Systems Design Engineering
August 10, 2014.
Letter of submittal
In the case of second, third and fourth work reports, the report must be accompanied
by a letter of submittal addressed to the Department Chair. Check that all names are
spelled correctly. Use either your employers letterhead, with their permission, or use
your home address on plain paper.
Your letter must contain the following information:

Report title

Report number (your rst, second, and so on)

Name of your employer

Academic term completed prior to this work term

Name(s) of your supervisor(s)

Department(s) in which you worked

Main activity of the employer and department

Purpose of the report

Full acknowledgment and explanation of any assistance you received in preparing

the report or its contents

Statement of endorsement (in the form and words shown below)

Statement of Condentiality (if required by your employer)

Your name, ID number, and signature

The statement of endorsement shall read:

I have prepared this report, [title], as my [term] Work Report for the [Company
Department] at [company name]. This report is the [rst, second, third, fourth] of three
that I must submit as part of my degree requirements, and it has not received any
previous academic credit. This report was entirely written by me and has not received any
previous academic credit at this or any other institution.

With the exception of the statement of endorsement, do not slavishly follow the example
at the Co-operative Education & Career Services web site. Compose your own letter, be
original, be creative.
Follow the format here:
9.php#Letter_of_Submittal

http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/manual/work_reports/9-

Abstract
100-200 word summary of your report that can completely stand alone. No references,
equations, acronyms, or other crazy stuff Can be descriptive (what the report contains
without stating results or conclusions) or Informative (contains results/conclusions and a
brief overview of problem, purpose, scope, and method. Write this at the end.

Contents
Abstract
Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 This is a Chapter Header
2.1 This is a section header
This is a sub-section
3 Conclusions and Recommendations
4 Summary
References
Appendix A

Glossary

Appendix B

Other Stuff

List of Tables
Table 1: This is a caption. It goes above the table...........................................................................
NOTE: Technically this should be:
1

This is a caption .. 2

But I could not make word do that automatically. If you can do this magic, let me know.
Prof MacGregor says with respect to this Slight modifications are acceptable provided
that they are consistent. So I plan to leave it like this.

List of Figures
Figure 1 An aggressive cow..........................................................................................................
NOTE: Technically this should be:
1

An aggressive cow 3

But I could not make word do that automatically. If you can do this magic, let me know.
Prof MacGregor says with respect to this Slight modifications are acceptable provided
that they are consistent. So I plan to leave it like this.

Acknowledgements
Got somebody you love? Use this optional section to thank them. If somebody gave you
money, you have to tell us.

1
Introduction
I made this template because I love you all so much. To get the most out of this template,
make sure you use the Styles pane and apply the appropriate styles I made. The style
guide has a full blank page between each chapter, however MacGregor says this is not
necessary. Chapter heading simply need to start on a new page. I have added extra page
breaks to always do a new page for each heading. The style guide has a lot of spacing
above chapter headings, however, Prof. MacGregor says this is not critical so I have
chosen to omit it.

2
This is a Chapter Header
Make sure you capitalize all major words in the chapter header. Chapters start on a new
page. Also dont forget the carriage return after the number (shift + enter), I could not add
that manually because word is stupid and thinks carriage return are unknown characters
in custom multi-level lists. If you figure out how to add the automatic carriage return,
please let me know.

2.1

This is a section header

Only capitalize the first word and any proper nouns. Only use section headers if you have
two or more section in a chapter.

This is a sub-section
Again, only capitalize the first word and any proper nouns. Only use sub-section headers
if you have two or more section in a chapter.
This is a sub-sub-section heading
Again, only capitalize the first word and any proper nouns. Only use sub-section headers
if you have two or more section in a chapter.
Paragraphs are weird, the second paragraph is supposed to be indented, but the first is
not. To make this work, I created a style Second Paragraph that you will automatically
be switched to following your first paragraph. This gets you your automatic indentation
just be careful with copy and paste issues.
Bonus tip: do not forget that contractions are verboten.
Table 1 is an empty table and should appear immediately after I reference it.
Table 1: This is a caption. It goes above the table

Now Ill make a footnote1. Foot notes should be for supplemental information, not
citations.
This is a figure. Figure 1 should appear as close as possible to where I referenced it.

Figure 1: An aggressive cow. Figure captions go below the figure.

Make sure you label figures well with keywords that match the text. Label with sans
sarif fonts, and use the same font and size throughout the document. Figures should be
kept to a minimum.
You can also include lists. The guide does not include an example, but I imagine its
like this:
1

Item 1

Item 2

You may choose to do ordinal or author citations in your report [1]. I chose to use
ordinal. Word can automatically do the citations for you, just make sure to set it to IEEE
style for best results (the references section doesnt exactly match the style guide, but
after 30 minutes of staring at an insane mess of XML, I give up trying to fix it). With
respect to citations, Pro MacGregor says IEEE or APA formats are acceptable. Again, it
is more important that the formatting be consistent throughout the document to make it
easier for the reader to follow the referencing style.

1 DO NOT USE THESE FOR CITATIONS.

3

3
Conclusions and Recommendations
What goals you met and how you met them. Extrapolate from your results to their
consequences. Describe what you would do differently next time. NO NEW RESULTS
SHOULD APPEAR HERE.

4
Summary
Summarize the report in 1-2 pages. For design reports where you build and tested
something, describe how well it performed.

References
[1] G. R. Heppler, "Systems Design Techinical Report Style Manual," 2009.

Appendix A
Glossary
List and define all acronyms used in your report. Note that this does not excuse you from
defining this inline when you first introduce a new term, it just gives the reader a central
place to look everything up.

Appendix B
Other Stuff
Do your appendix stuff here. Make sure to use the special Appendix style for headings.
Supporting material that would be distracting to the reader goes here.