To provide the student with a practical and comprehensive set of skills for the acquisition, management, manipulation, and presentation of scientific information. This module is entirely practically based, with the emphasis on information technology applications in the areas of chemistry, biochemistry, environmental science and health & safety.

- Scientific literature retrieval - use of Internet/Intranet databases e.g. Science Direct, ASTI, Medline, Ullmanns and OHSIS. - Presentational skills: (i) Scientific drawing - use of a chemical drawing package (e.g. ChemSketch) to produce 2- and 3-d representations of molecular structures; (ii) Scientific graphing - use of e.g. Advanced Grapher to create professional quality graphs. Computer-aided audio-visual presentations using MS Powerpoint. - Rudiments of spreadsheets: entering names, numbers and formulas into cells; calculations and simple formulae; display of equations in the spreadsheet; editing, deleting, copying and pasting cell contents; formatting cells in a spreadsheet; relative and fixed (absolute) cell references; ordering data within spreadsheets; creating and embedding charts and graphs; saving and formatting for printing; - Built-in functions for summarizing and evaluating data e.g. count, sum, minimum, maximum, average, mode, median, standard deviation, frequency, permutations and combinations, geometric mean, harmonic mean, probability and distributions, regression analysis; - Descriptive statistics: ranking by percentile, calculating moving averages, exponential smoothing, generating random numbers, sampling data; - Importing and Exporting Data: Import/export data from/to another file, e.g. a text file, a web page. - Pivot tables and pivot charts; - Creating Macros; - Introduction to Visual Basic for spreadsheet applications in chemistry, biochemistry, environmental science and health & safety.

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: 1. Interrogate various scientific literature databases. 2. Use appropriate software tools to create presentations. 3. Use Microsoft Excel to create spreadsheets which perform basic mathematical and statistical analysis on data. 4. Use Visual Basic for spreadsheet applications.