Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter June/July 2006

March 2006 Meeting -- Designing Datasheet Templates
Presented by Jackie Athey and reviewed by Keith A. Albert

Datasheets are documents that contain information about a product, designed to convince readers to purchase that product, explained Jackie Athey at the March meeting of the San Francisco Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

Consisting of both marketing and technical information, datasheets are more compiled than written. Typically, they consist of discrete segments of prose designed for business-to-business communication, resembling, more than anything else, product briefs (which could be viewed as abstracts of datasheets). Some brochures, especially automotive ones, qualify as datasheets when they include technical data. On the other hand, datasheets are not reference manuals: although high-level, they do not exhaustively list components and functions. Nor are they user guides: datasheets aim to explain why to do something, not how to do something.

Each of the two parts of a datasheet is substantially different. The first part, targeting decision makers, is both marketing oriented and marketing driven, and is written at a high-level. The second part is technical in nature, comprised of the nuts and bolts of the product. It seeks to motivate decision influencers. Although each of these components is capable of standing alone, datasheets weld them together.

The style and content of datasheets varies from industry to industry.

• Automotive brochure datasheets place glossy, marketing elements next to high-level technical specifications such as dimension and capacity.
   
• ATMI containers, such as bag-in-a-bottle and bag-in-a-can, are marketed through brief, visually appealing datasheets designed for rapid comprehension.
   
• Banking datasheets seek to encourage readers to purchase a product and list technical data about rates.
   
• Datasheets promoting Loctite, a type of anaerobic adhesive for chemical manufacturers, feature very little marketing information, are not at all glossy, may spell out directions for use and may also contain safety information.
   
• Safety datasheets have almost no marketing information, but provide heavily regulated safety information such as instructions for disposal, proper environmental safety procedures (e.g., eyewash, antidotes) and emergency contact information.
   
• The semiconductor industry has several forms of datasheets including broadcom, which summarizes datasheets information for a general audience, spansion datasheets, which summarize multichip products, incorporating several datasheets into one. The latter includes purchasing information and timing diagrams and is quite marketing oriented.

As always, the principal idea for any technical communicator to keep in mind when writing datasheets is what are the expectations of the audience. Follow the company’s stylebook, and for longer datasheets, consider adding a table of contents, chapters, pagination, descriptive headers or a glossary.

Copyright © 2006 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication under the provisions of the chapter's copyright policy.

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