Geology 454
Placing images in your lab reports
Throughout your professional careers, you will be judged on the quality and appearance of the analysis
you present to supervisors, clients & advisors. As noted in the lab assignment, you will be expected to
hand in reports using Microsoft Word. To enhance your reports, you will want to add graphical
illustrations of the results of your model studies. This short handout illustrates how to incorporate images
into your reports for discussion and comparison.
The approach essentially consists of making a copy of an image on your computer screen and placing it
into the body of your report. This can easily be done using the Print Screen & Alt Print Screen button
sequence. Let's say that you wanted to illustrate one of the models you’ve developed for the terrain
conductivity lab. The results shown below represent output from IX1D for sounding EM1. To copy the
image from the screen, simply press the Alt Print Screen sequence (both buttons at the same time).
You can place your image in a text box or just paste into the text.
Figure 1: Results of inverse modeling
Either way, use the Edit Paste option in Word (or simultaneously push down on the Ctrl & V
keys) to place the model image where desired.
Figure 2: Access text wrapping options as shown above. Top to
bottom allows you to move the image around and place your
image in the desired location.
The print screen option will give you a copy of everything on your desktop (see below).
Figure 3: Print Screen produces a copy of the entire screen. The above is from a dual monitor setup.
Use the cropping tool to show the portion of the image of relevance to your report
– to eliminate unwanted areas along the border in your screen capture.
Cropping tool
With minor editing we can obtain the following plot of the time section.
You may find this a useful way to illustrate lab reports as well as papers and reports in your
other classes.
Use of the Alt – Print Screen option will probably work best for these lab exercises.
Remember that when two or more windows are open the active window is identified as the
one with the blue highlighted bar across the top. The Alt-Print Screen sequence cuts the
active window and the Ctrl V sequence pastes the window into your text box.