Quick Guide to Overleaf and LaTeX

LaTeX is a typesetting system that creates beautiful scientific documents. You can still submit handwritten homeworks, but we recommend using LaTeX.

Here are some resources on LaTeX to help you get started. There are many excellent tutorials on LaTeX online as well, but we’ve compiled some of our own so you can see how mathmatical notation works.

Adding Homework Templates to Overleaf

Overleaf is a useful online LaTex tool that you can use to make math equations and save to PDFs. Overleaf is not required for any Data 100 work, but it’s good to know in general.

Please note that once you finish your homework, you will need to download the PDF from Overleaf and upload the PDF to Gradescope. This is the same process you’d follow if you were to write your answers by hand.

  • Download the homework template file (with extension ending in .zip) from the course website. You do not need to open/extract these files.
  • On the Overleaf website (register with your berkeley.edu account), go to “New Project” -> “Upload Project”.
A screenshot of part of the Overleaf home website, where Upload project (under New Project) is highlighted.
  • Navigate to the correct .zip file and confirm. The zip file will upload.
overleaf screenshot
  • Overleaf will automatically extract this zip and create a new Overleaf project. A screenshot of an Overleaf project.

Submission

You should download the PDF from Overleaf and upload the PDF to Gradescope. To download the PDF from Overleaf, click this button.

A screenshot of how to export Overleaf into a PDF. Click the button.