Effortlessly Create Professional Reports with Frame Templates
Which parts of your work do you love the most? Do you love spending time in the field? Mentoring young scientists? Processing and analyzing data? Creating engaging visuals? Presenting your results? Creating finished reports that align with stakeholder, client, and regulatory requirements?
Wait, you don’t love creating reports? Then you’re in luck! Surfer and Grapher frame templates are here to help you quickly and easily create professional reports so you can spend more time doing what you love.
What are Frame Templates?
Frame Templates are pre-designed layouts that you can use to build professional reports in no time. They include all of the required supporting elements like titles, descriptive text, and section frames for your report. All you need to do is update any text and add your map or graph, legend, and scale.
Example empty frame template open in Surfer
Benefits of Frame Templates
1. Quality
A clean and organized report that clearly outlines all required information, instills trust and confidence in the reporting agency. Whether your report is going to a client, company leader or government agency, establishing yourself as a trusted expert makes it easier to ensure the results you’re sharing will be carefully considered.
2. Consistency
Consistency and clarity are two sides of the same coin. A report with consistent layouts, formatting and coloring throughout, makes it easier for the audience to quickly interpret all figures and focus on understanding the information being presented.
Consistency in reporting also creates a sense of reliability and professionalism which leads to more confidence and trust in your organization.
3. Time-Savings
Creating and manually adjusting a report layout is tedious and time consuming. Pre-built frame templates eliminate the need to manually align layout elements and are easy to personalize with your business and project information.
After the template is used to generate a finished report, the time savings continue. The consistent use of standard layouts leads to faster review and approval from stakeholders and clients.
4. Ease of Use
Nothing makes mundane work worse than a frustrating and overly complex process that can lead to errors or omissions. Frame templates include fields for commonly required information which can be updated with a simple double-click. This makes it easy to create high quality professional reports all in one software application.
How to use Frame Templates
In Surfer:
- Download the attached Surfer frame template file.
- Open Surfer and browse to the downloaded file from the Surfer Welcome dialog.
- Click File | Save | Save As to rename the file for your current project.
- Create a map, legend, and other elements as you normally would or copy/paste a finished map into this new project.
- Edit the text and other items in the User Edit Contents group
- Save and export the finished map to your preferred presentation format.
In Grapher:
- Download the attached Grapher frame template file.
- Open Grapher and browse to the downloaded file from the Grapher Welcome dialog.
- Click File | Save | Save As to rename the file for your current project.
- Create a map, legend, and other elements as you normally would or copy/paste a finished map into this new project.
- Edit the text and other items in the User Edit Contents group
- Save and export the finished map to your preferred presentation format.
Example frame template and geophysical survey report created by Cascade Imaging Solutions
Frame Templates in Surfer and Grapher are here to streamline the way you create reports. They save time, ensure consistency, and help you produce professional-quality documents effortlessly. Give them a try and watch your report processing time transform into time for the work you enjoy most!
FAQ
When will more frame templates be available?
Surfer Beta version 28.0.220 includes several frame templates in the samples directory (C:\Program Files\Golden Software\Surfer Beta\Samples\Frame Templates). Similar frame templates will be available in Grapher Beta in the next update.
Can I customize these frame templates?
Yes! There are two groups of objects in each frame template. The User Edit Contents group contains objects that will always need updating and the Frame group contains objects that most often will not need updating. However, both groups of objects can be edited. To edit the objects in the Frame group, select it and then click Layout | Position | Lock to unlock the group. Once the group is unlocked you can edit the entire objects normally. To protect your changes, we recommend locking the Frame group again after you’re done with your edits.
