Federal law dictates that employers must provide information to their employees about hazardous materials and chemicals that employees may be exposed to in the workplace. The vehicle for that information is the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS).
While there is no specified format for the MSDS, OSHA has developed a non-mandatory format, OSHA Form 174, which may be used by chemical manufacturers and importers to comply with OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard. You are entitled to receive a data sheet from your supplier.
Here's a blank OSHA Form 174: Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) that shows you what kind of information you need to get from your suppliers and to convey to your employees regarding the chemicals, including the identity, characteristics, and hazard data.
Note that if workers may be exposed to hazardous materials in your workplace, you are required by OSHA to have a written hazard communication program. If, in addition to OSHA Form 174, you would also like a model of such a program that you can customize for your workplace, return to the list of Worker Safety documents and choose "Hazard Communication Program Package." The package consists of the model program and Form 174.
The file is in rich text format (RTF) that is suitable for use with most word processing programs used in the Windows environment. However, the file includes Word 6.0/7.0 tables, which may not be rendered properly by some word processing programs.