Master Files Overview

An overview of master files.

Standardizing a report template helps an organization agree on a Document or Presentation report style across all the teams.

Master files or base templates contain a standardized template for a Document or Presentation report. These documents contain standard definitions for word styles, designs, header/footer sections, and so on. Using master documents ensures uniform report generation every time. In the Report tool, the master documents are the starting point for all Document and Presentation report creation.

Document Master

A Document master file must contain placeholders for the following components:
  • Table of contents
    Note: When exporting a Document report, a Word processing application is required to auto-update the Table of Contents.
  • Table of figures
  • Table of tables
  • Table of references
  • Style formats (available in the Styles ribbon)
There are other elements which are not mandatory, but a Document master file may contain:
  • Headers/footers
  • Page numbers
  • Watermark images
  • Design and borders

Presentation Master

You can create Presentation master files based on the following approaches:
  1. Slide Master Layouts- Presentation master files based on Slide Master Layouts must contain placeholders for the following elements:
    • Slide masters
    • Secondary slides with image, text, and table placeholders. These placeholders are replaced by actual report content at the time of export.
    • Style formats (available in the Styles ribbon)
  2. Slides with Existing Content- Presentation master files based on slides with existing content must contain sample images, text, and table data. When this slide is used in the report, the same images, text and table are replaced with actual report content while exporting a report. In the sample shown below Figure 2, there are 5 text boxes, 2 images and 1 table to read into Report structure and are replaced with new report content at the time of export.
  3. Slides with Generic Placeholders- Generic placeholders for image, text, and table placeholders. This allows you to open the Presentation reports in open source applications such as Google Docs and LibreOffice.
Tip: While creating a layout, follow a sequence for creating the content placeholders. You can use the Edit Master feature in the respective applications.

You may arrange the content (image, text, or table) shapes in your application by dragging text within the selection pane or using the context menu. By default, a newly added item appears at the top of the list. Use the Z-Order technique for arranging the shapes in the slides.

During Presentation export, order is decided based on the list in selection pane.


Figure 1.


Figure 2.

HTML Master

Generate HTML master file by modifying the default master layout available in the HyperWorks installation.

To modify the master layout follow the below steps:

  1. Copy the folder htmlMaster1 from ALTAIR_HOME\hwdesktop\mv\scripts\tcl\report\templates\ to a new directory.
  2. Open the Index_Layout.html file from htmlMaster1 folder.

    The following placeholders are editable in Index_Layout.html:

    1. REPORT_TITLE
    2. REPORT_TOC
    3. REPORT_CONTENT
  3. Change the logo and disclaimer statement in the Index_Layout.html file.


    Figure 3.
  4. Edit the style.css in the resource folder for modifying the properties of each placeholder.

    For instance, to modify the REPORT_TITLE, navigate to report-title class in the style.css file and edit the values for properties such as colour, font and width as illustrated below:



    Figure 4.