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Empowering students, teachers, and chemists to easily author documents in the language of chemistry is at the heart of the Chemistry Add-in for Word. Every discipline has its own language. And being able to communicate and collaborate in a discipline-specific language is essential to scientific research, especially in an environment characterized by staggering volumes of data. In chemistry, not only is there a specific language, but a specific language with specific symbols and conventions. By giving these symbols meaning, the Chemistry Add-in for Word is also enabling chemistry documents to easily convey this meaning across technologies and file formats.

The product of a collaboration between Microsoft Research, and the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the University of Cambridge, the Chemistry Add-in for Word makes it easier for students, chemists and researchers to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas and 2D depictions, from within Microsoft Office Word. It harnesses the power of Chemical Markup Language (XML for chemistry), making it possible to not only author chemical content in Word, but also to include the data behind those structures. Put simply, the Chemistry Add-in for Word and Chemical Markup Language help to makes chemistry documents open, readable and easily accessible, not just to other humans, but to other technologies as well.