Did you know that it's easy to create a bibliography based on common citation formats in Microsoft Word?

A few months ago, we were asking students about how they write a research paper. Jon, a freshman at a local community college, had just completed a huge term paper that counted for a large percentage of his overall grade in a class. While describing how he wrote this paper, he told me he hated writing bibliographies because he couldn't remember the proper format for citing sources. Unaware that Word has a built-in solution to his problem, he had turned to an online alternative. When I told him about the citation generator in Word he said, "Word does what? Where's that at?"

Check out my full blog post to learn how it's done.

Do you need to use a Euro symbol in an economics paper? How about a Celsius degree in a lab report? Or, maybe you need to insert special characters into your math homework. I recently discovered the Math AutoCorrect feature in Word and realized that I could use it for more than just math stuff.

Math AutoCorrect lets me insert symbols and special characters into my documents using keyboard shortcuts. Click the full post to watch a short video where I demonstrate how to insert symbols and special characters into a Word 2010 or Word 2007 document. I also provide step-by-step instructions and keyboard shortcuts, if that's your preference.

Earlier in the year I worked with Beth Melton, an Excel MVP, to create a super easy and visual gradebook template in Excel 2010. It’s built for teachers with little to no Microsoft Excel experience. In fact, all of the grade calculation formulas are taken care of for you. We built the template in Excel 2010, because of all the new 2010 data visualization features. It even includes a printable student progress report!

Take a look at what this new gradebook template has to offer.

Ever had 30 kids staring at you as you try to get a presentation going? Or perhaps, you've got a big project due and you want to wow your teacher. Whatever your role in education, we're here to help.

Five writers have united to contribute ideas and tips for using Microsoft Office inside and outside the classroom. Within the Office group at Microsoft, Jennifer, Michael, Tami, Matt, and Deb write content for products such as Interactive Classroom and Mathematics add-ins for Office as well as Microsoft Math 3.0 and Microsoft OneNote. We're bringing our experience with education, mixing it with our knowledge of Office products and services, and serving it up to you on our new blog.

Today's blog post is brought to you by Tami Amador, our resident Microsoft Mathematics writer.

Introducing Microsoft Mathematics 4.0, a full-featured graphing calculator. It’s designed to work just like those expensive handheld calculators and it’s optimized for algebra, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus. Additional math tools help you solve systems of equations, evaluate sides and angles in a triangle, and convert from one system of units to another.

Read the full post to find out how to get this new free tool!

According to a survey released Thursday from the National Survey of Student Engagement, many students fail to use effective study techniques to help them succeed in school. The New York Times reported, "The great majority of students take notes in class, but fewer than two-thirds review them later, and even fewer take notes while reading."

Did you know that you can insert professionally formatted formulas and equations into your Word documents? That means you can do your math homework in Word and not get docked points for your illegible handwriting. In addition to that, the free Microsoft Mathematics Add-In for Word and OneNote lets you solve equations and expressions containing real and complex numbers and even plot 2D and 3D graphs. Don't get too excited. It doesn't do all the work for you. You'll still need to show how you solved an equation, but at least this way you can check your work and see if you're getting the correct answer.

If you're a math teacher or student, check out the following video where I demonstrate how to solve equations and plot graphs using the Mathematics Add-In with Microsoft Word 2010. If you're interested in more free math resources, read my full blog post.

Today's post about a creative use of Access 2010 is by Abhay Parekh, who's in his last year of studies in engineering at the University of Mumbai in India. Abhay also teaches lower-level students how to create and use Microsoft Access databases.

For my final project, I had to create a website that tracks real-time details of flights, buses, taxis and other services for a fictional high-traffic airport. I needed a database that could feed this mass of data through my algorithm, so I could predict when and where taxis were needed.

College graduates will tackle the job market soon. What better way to stand out from the crowd than to have a software app release on your resume?

DreamSpark, a program set up by Microsoft to provide professional-level developer and design tools to students around the world for free, recently partnered with Windows Phone 7.

That means you can download the components that you need to complete your development environment and start making your own Windows Phone 7 apps. Links and details are available in the full blog post.

Want to build your own molecule image and add it to your research paper? Or how about add subscripts and superscripts to electrons and isotopes? Today, you can. Microsoft Research just released version 1.0 of their Chemistry Add-in for Word.

Read the full blog post to find out more about this new revelation in semantic chemistry.