University of Birmingham on Overleaf
Overview
The University of Birmingham is providing free Overleaf Professional accounts for all students, faculty and staff within the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences who would like to use a collaborative, online LaTeX editor for their projects. Overleaf Professional accounts provide real-time track changes, unlimited collaborators, and full document history.
Overleaf is designed to make the process of writing, editing and producing your research papers and project reports much quicker for both you and your collaborators. Overleaf can also be linked to other services such as reference managers to best fit into your workflow.
Claim your free Professional account on Overleaf by signing up (or signing in) below. You'll need to verify a Birmingham email address in order to receive your free Professional account.
If you have already signed in, click on the quick start tab to explore the University's and Overleaf's tutorials or on the Overleaf icon in the banner to reach your homepage.
This service is approved for use with non-confidential university work. For more information on what this means, please see the Information Classification section of the University of Birmingham IT policy website - https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/it/governance/policy/index.aspx.
Join a community of over 3180 authors at University of Birmingham
Quick Start
Welcome to the Birmingham quick start guide to Overleaf. We've put together some useful resources and links in the sections below, and if you have any questions about how to get started please let us know and we'll be happy to help!
For Students
Try out the Overleaf editor with built in tutorial
If you'd like to dive straight into the editor, simply click the button to create a new paper using our quick-start template. A short tutorial will walk you through the main features to quickly get you started.
Browse the Overleaf template gallery
You can find a selection of featured templates, or check out our full template gallery for more ideas and inspiration.
Take our free course to quickly master the LaTeX essentials
If you're new to LaTeX, we've put together a free online course to help you learn the basics. If you have never used LaTeX before, or if it has been a while and you would like a refresher, this is the place to start.
For Researchers
Find a journal template
Through our partnerships within the publishing community, we provide a selection of academic journal templates for articles and papers. These templates automatically format your manuscripts in the style required for submission to that journal.
Edit in Rich Text mode or directly in LaTeX
Overleaf provides and intuitive and easy-to-use manuscript editor (our rich text mode), which is especially useful if you or your co-authors aren't familiar with writing in LaTeX.
If you prefer to edit directly in LaTeX, you can! Overleaf provides a full collaborative online LaTeX editor you can switch to at any time.
Submitting your articles to journals, repositories and more
You can also submit your paper directly to a number of journals and other editorial and review services via the publish menu in the editor. Simply open the publish menu from any document and follow the appropriate 'Submit to ...' link.
For Teachers
Publishing your projects in the Overleaf gallery
A quick way to share your course templates or lecture notes is to publish them in the Overleaf gallery. You can publish any project from Overleaf to the gallery in just a few clicks.
Demonstrating auto-compile error handling to your students
Auto-compile helps users new to LaTeX to find errors in their syntax quickly and easily, and encourages them to fix them as they go, to produce clean, error-free documents.
Show your class how to turn on track changes for review (Overleaf v2 only)
Overleaf v2 offers an impressive collection of new and upgraded collaboration features, and your institutional subscription provides all users with access to the powerful track changes feature.
Intro Videos
Featured LaTeX Templates
FAQ & Help
Who should I contact if I have questions about Overleaf or the Birmingham license?
Please use our contact form and we'll make sure your question gets to the right person in our team.
I'm new to Overleaf, how should I get started?
We've put together a short How do I use Overleaf help page to give you pointers on exactly that :)
How do I upload an existing LaTeX project into Overleaf?
Here's an FAQ on how to import existing LaTeX documents into Overleaf.
What packages does Overleaf support?
Overleaf supports the packages listed here.