Portable Documents Format

[Tonja Witcraft]

Thispage provides an overview of requirements for senior/key personnel documents. See the full requirements for these documents in the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) II.2.D.h.

NSF requires a biographical sketch for each individual identified as senior/key personnel. See PAPPG Chapter II.D.2.h(i) for complete coverage on the content and formatting requirements for the biographical sketch.

This document outlines an individual's education and training, their appointments and positions, and other information that helps NSF assess how well qualified the individual is to conduct the proposed activities.

Note: Starting May 20, 2024, biographical sketches should no longer include information on synergistic activities. These activities must instead be listed in the new Synergistic Activities document.

Senior/key personnel are required to certify that the information is current, accurate and complete. This includes, but is not limited to, information related to domestic and foreign appointments and positions. The certification language is included in the SciENcv template.

NSF has partnered with the National Institutes of Health to use SciENcv: Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae as the NSF-approved format for use in preparation of the biographical sketch section of an NSF proposal. Adoption of a single, common researcher profile system for federal grants reduces administrative burden for researchers.

NSF requires information on all current and pending support for ongoing projects and proposals. This document contains a list of an individual's proposed and active projects and sources of support. It is used by NSF to assess:

Senior/key personnel are required to certify that the information is current, accurate and complete. This includes, but is not limited to, information related to current, pending and other support (both foreign and domestic).

NSF has partnered with the National Institutes of Health to use SciENcv: Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae as the NSF-approved format for use in preparation of the current and pending support section of an NSF proposal. Adoption of a single, common researcher profile system for federal grants reduces administrative burden for researchers.

This document contains a table of an individual's collaborators, such as their advisors, co-authors and students. NSF requires the use of the Collaborators and Other Affiliations Excel Template for identifying this information. NSF uses Collaborators and Other Affiliations information during the merit review process to help manage reviewer selection. To expedite identification of potential reviewers, having a standard, searchable format for this information is essential.

By having each principal investigator, co-PI and other senior project personnel individually upload an .xlsx document, and having Research.gov perform all of the conversions, we preserve searchable text in the resulting PDFs to the greatest extent practicable. This will help reduce the burden on NSF program staff who currently must spend time to manipulate files that are non-searchable.

In addition to the benefits to the merit review process, it is hoped that this template will provide a compliant and reusable format for PIs to maintain and update their collaborators and other affiliations information for use in subsequent proposal submissions to NSF.

Refer to PAPPG II.D.2.h(iii) for the full Collaborators and Other Affiliations information requirements. A brief outline of the information you will need to include is provided below.

You must use NSF's Collaborators and Other Affiliations Excel Template to prepare your information. The template has been developed to be fillable, however, the content and format requirements must not be altered as this will create printing and viewing errors.

A document file format is a text or binary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers.There currently exist a multitude of incompatible document file formats.

In 1993, the ITU-T tried to establish a standard for document file formats, known as the Open Document Architecture (ODA) which was supposed to replace all competing document file formats. It is described in ITU-T documents T.411 through T.421, which are equivalent to ISO 8613. It did not succeed.

Page description languages such as PostScript and PDF have become the de facto standard for documents that a typical user should only be able to create and read, not edit. In 2001, a series of ISO/IEC standards for PDF began to be published, including the specification for PDF itself, ISO-32000.

The default binary file format used by Microsoft Word (.doc) has become widespread de facto standard for office documents, but it is a proprietary format and is not always fully supported by other word processors.

You'll find several kinds of fields in your application forms - check boxes, dates, data entry fields, and attachments. This page provides guidance on attachments. Attachments are documents that are prepared outside the application using whatever editing software you desire (e.g., Microsoft Word), converted to PDF format, and then added or uploaded to your application. We require PDF format to preserve document formatting and a consistent reading experience for reviewers and staff.

We have very specific attachment formatting requirements. Failure to follow these requirements may lead to application errors upon submission or withdrawal of your application from funding consideration.

Adherence to font size, type density, line spacing, and text color requirements is necessary to ensure readability and fairness. Although font requirements apply to all attachments, they are most important and most heavily scrutinized in attachments with page limits.

I am trying to generate certificates of completion with document builder and include the date of conferral. No matter how I enter the date into a date field (my preference is "Friday, January 1, 2021" as the format), it always enters in the 1/1/21 format. Any ideas for getting document builder to fill it correctly?

I am struggling with the same issue listed in this thread, however my problem is that I cannot add the date as a text because there are other columns that automatically calculate from the date column. Can I somehow copy the date into a text column without running into a formatting issue?

I find the document builder extremely frustrating from a formatting perspective, this being one of them. The workarounds are not consistent with what they are presenting the features to be - its much less simple that its trying to seem. My formatting is coming through is various stretched out sized, text cut-off in the form field, etc. There needs to be a formatting edit feature that affects the document only, and not needing the source sheet to have the same format (text alignment, font size, etc)

@SueinSpain I'm interested in which date format you used. I've tried what you mentioned. I modified the fields in the pdf to date DD-MMM-YYYY (same as my column date format in the sheet), remapped it but the form generated was still showing the date in DD/MM/YY (in Europe) and MM/DD/YY for my US colleague.? It looks like the date regional settings is the default format used for the date column when generating a document.

I still can't get it to do a long date, but I did a ridiculous workaround with three helper columns which at least brings it up in English format. (I needed mine entered at the end of the sentence so I had to add a full stop/period afterwards.)

Shocked that this is still a problem. Smartsheet is great in so many ways, but the fact that taking information from the date column and transferring it into the document builder using the format already set in the source column is quite simply astonishing. This has been a known issue for what...three years now? Any other column seems to pull in exactly as it is sourced.

I saw somewhere else it is based on your profile preference but after looking through countless regional preferences I did not see one that even was set as MM/DD/YYYY. Come on guys.....if this is how the formatting is based then add ONE that uses that format. Better still add one that uses MM/DD/YYYY and another that uses Month/Day/Year (ex January 01, 2023).

Here's a solution. You have to make a separate Smartsheet that has the month numbers and corresponding spelled out month names AND you have to have a year column with the 2 digit year and another column with the corresponding 4-digit year.

You need to make sure that if the date is formatted as "08" then you need to put an apostrophe before the 08 ('08) for the index/match formula to read it. You have to do the same for the 2-digit year.

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Filing a new non provisional 111(a) application? As of January 17, 2024, specification, claims and abstracts not filed in DOCX format, including preliminary amendments filed on the same day as the application, will incur a non-DOCX surcharge of up to $400 for this filing type. See the Federal Register notice, Official Gazette Notice, and DOCX FAQs for more information.

Extended until further notice, exclusively in Patent Center, applicants have the option to upload a backup (auxiliary) PDF version of their application with their DOCX version. There are no fees associated with this auxiliary PDF. See the Federal Register notice for more information.

As a part of our continuous efforts to modernize and streamline our patent application systems, applicants have the ability to file patent application-related documents in DOCX format through Patent Center. Patent Center registered and unregistered users may file the specification, claims, abstract and drawings in DOCX format.

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