Keeping your account secure
The security of your Overleaf account and your project data are important to you, and they're also important to us. Overleaf provides a number of features to keep you informed about any changes to your account. If you have any questions about suspicious activity on your account, please contact us.
Requests for sensitive account information
Employees of Overleaf will never ask you to provide your password or complete billing information to us via our support channels. If you receive such a request, it will not have come from us and is not legitimate. You can treat any such messages as phishing attempts.
Resetting your password
If you believe your Overleaf account password may have been compromised, or would like to change it for any other reason, there are two methods to change it.
- If you know your current Overleaf password, you can change the password at your user settings page.
- You can reset your password by entering your account's primary email address at our password reset page. If there's an Overleaf account with a matching primary email address, we'll send an email with instructions to reset your password. If you don't receive the password reset instructions within a few minutes, please check your spam/junk folders, as well as any filters you may have set up, for any messages from welcome@overleaf.com.
- We recommend that you set (or reset) a strong password that is not shared with any other site. Using a free password manager is a good approach.
If you use another method for logging in to Overleaf, for example Institutional Login, "Log in with ORCID", or similar, you can manage your password through those services.
Checking for other active sessions on your account
You can view any other active sessions for your account by following the steps at How can I know whether there are other sessions open on my account.
Email notifications about changes to your account
We'll send you email notifications about certain changes to your account settings. Make sure that the primary email associated with your Overleaf account is up to date, accessible to you, and can receive emails from welcome@overleaf.com. To change add or update your email address, use the instructions at Changing email address associated with an account.
Here are some examples of changes to your account settings that result in an email notification:
- Changing your account's primary email address.
- Adding a secondary email address to your account.
- Linking your Overleaf account with a third-party service. (Examples: Google, ORCID, Dropbox, and GitHub.)
- Linking your Overleaf account with an institutional single sign-on provider (available if you're a member of selected institutions).
- Clearing your Overleaf account's active sessions.
If you receive an email notification for an account change that you don't recognise, please contact us right away so we can investigate. It's also good practice to reset your password and check for any active sessions if you are notified of activity that you do not recognise.
Your responsibilities
While Overleaf provides features to help you keep your account secure, you must use your Overleaf account in a secure way in order to keep your projects and personal identification safe. Overleaf's terms of service note that you are responsible for maintaining and protecting all of your stuff.
Every Overleaf user must have their own individual account.
Sharing an Overleaf account is not the correct way to collaborate on a project or to provide premium features to multiple users.
To collaborate with others on a document, use Overleaf's sharing options. If you are part of a team using Overleaf, each team member gets their own account. Team members' accounts might join a group subscription to gain access to premium features.
If you are using a shared device in your home, lab, library, or other location, please make sure to sign out of your Overleaf account when you are done with your work.
Use a secure login method
Overleaf offers multiple login methods. If you are using the email and password based login method, you must use a strong password. We recommend using a password manager and setting up a unique password for your Overleaf account.
Overleaf also provides options to log in with Google or ORCID. For some types of subscriptions, Overleaf offers Single Sign-On (SSO) options.
Make sure you can access your primary email address
Important security notifications and password-reset links are sent to your primary email address. It is essential that your primary email address is always set to be one that you can access. If you are are leaving an institution or changing your email address, be sure to update the primary email address on your Overleaf account before you lose access to your current email address.
Allow emails from welcome@overleaf.com
As described above, you may receive important email notifications about your account. If you mark emails from welcome@overleaf.com as spam or junk, you may not receive important notifications about your Overleaf account. We ask that you be sure to check that these emails are not being sent to your spam or junk folder, and that you do not mark these as spam.
Overleaf guides
- Creating a document in Overleaf
- Uploading a project
- Copying a project
- Creating a project from a template
- Using the Overleaf project menu
- Including images in Overleaf
- Exporting your work from Overleaf
- Working offline in Overleaf
- Using Track Changes in Overleaf
- Using bibliographies in Overleaf
- Sharing your work with others
- Using the History feature
- Debugging Compilation timeout errors
- How-to guides
- Guide to Overleaf’s premium features
LaTeX Basics
- Creating your first LaTeX document
- Choosing a LaTeX Compiler
- Paragraphs and new lines
- Bold, italics and underlining
- Lists
- Errors
Mathematics
- Mathematical expressions
- Subscripts and superscripts
- Brackets and Parentheses
- Matrices
- Fractions and Binomials
- Aligning equations
- Operators
- Spacing in math mode
- Integrals, sums and limits
- Display style in math mode
- List of Greek letters and math symbols
- Mathematical fonts
- Using the Symbol Palette in Overleaf
Figures and tables
- Inserting Images
- Tables
- Positioning Images and Tables
- Lists of Tables and Figures
- Drawing Diagrams Directly in LaTeX
- TikZ package
References and Citations
- Bibliography management with bibtex
- Bibliography management with natbib
- Bibliography management with biblatex
- Bibtex bibliography styles
- Natbib bibliography styles
- Natbib citation styles
- Biblatex bibliography styles
- Biblatex citation styles
Languages
- Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using polyglossia and fontspec
- Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec
- International language support
- Quotations and quotation marks
- Arabic
- Chinese
- French
- German
- Greek
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
Document structure
- Sections and chapters
- Table of contents
- Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
- Indices
- Glossaries
- Nomenclatures
- Management in a large project
- Multi-file LaTeX projects
- Hyperlinks
Formatting
- Lengths in LaTeX
- Headers and footers
- Page numbering
- Paragraph formatting
- Line breaks and blank spaces
- Text alignment
- Page size and margins
- Single sided and double sided documents
- Multiple columns
- Counters
- Code listing
- Code Highlighting with minted
- Using colours in LaTeX
- Footnotes
- Margin notes
Fonts
Presentations
Commands
Field specific
- Theorems and proofs
- Chemistry formulae
- Feynman diagrams
- Molecular orbital diagrams
- Chess notation
- Knitting patterns
- CircuiTikz package
- Pgfplots package
- Typesetting exams in LaTeX
- Knitr
- Attribute Value Matrices
Class files
- Understanding packages and class files
- List of packages and class files
- Writing your own package
- Writing your own class