Chalmers has a number of licensed software available to employees. You can find a list of these here.
Lars Hellberg (lars.hellberg (at) chalmers.se) is the local responsible for software licenses. This will soon change, though and there is supposed to be a portal, where you can log in and administer licenses yourself.

For software relating to experimental setups and data handling you can find more information here.

For software relating to the theoretical methods we use at the division you can find more information here.

Below you will find a list with different suggestions for software

Graphics

• WebPlotDigitizer is a web-based tool for extracting data points from pre-existing image files.
• Blender is an open-source 3D visualization software.
• KaleidaGraph (licensed)
• Matplotlib is an open-source python based plotting library. You can find a basic example here.
• XMGrace
• Gnuplot is a powerful open-source plotting software for Linux machines. For help with more sophisticated plots, some examples are given here.
• MagicPlot
• VESTA is a 3D visualization program for structural models, volumetric data such as electron/nuclear densities, and crystal morphologies. Download here.
• POV-Ray
• GIMP is an open-source editor for raster graphics
• Inkscape is an open-source editor for vector graphics
• Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing application which can be used for posters, flyers etc.
• Adobe Illustrator for figures (licensed)
• Adobe InDesign for posters (licensed)
• Matlab (licensed) is the program for calculations and plotting.
• LibreOffice is the open-source wannabe Microsoft Office.
• Microsoft Office (licensed) is unfortunately much better than LibreOffice.
• PyMOL for 3D visualization. Note that there is one licensed version but also an open-source version.
• ChemDraw for drawing molecular structural formulae (licenced). There is a free online version if you are not doing anything too complicated.

Bibliographic

• Zotero is a reference manager with a plug-in available for various browsers. It collects your references which you can organize and export as Bibtex or in another format and it greatly simplifies extracting bibliographic information from the web, especially articles on journal home pages. The BetterBibLaTeX add-on is nice. It supports drag-and-drop for references etcetera (for a web browser you need to use another editor as an intermediate). Install it from here https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/wiki/Installation
• Mendeley is a freeware reference manager which manages and synchronizes your library of pdf files across all your computers and devices. Mendeley has a built-in pdf reader which supports highlighting and annotations. Citations can be exported to Microsoft Word, Libreoffice and Bibtex. Clients are available for Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android.
• EndNote is used by some people. You can get it from Chalmers Software Center now.
• Jabref is a very light-weight freeware Java based(cross-platform) reference manager with many of the necessary features.
  

Text

• LaTeX - the way to go.
• LibreOffice - a way to go.
• Microsoft Word - hardly the way to go.
• Typewriter - still better than Word.

Mail

• Thunderbird is a free email application you can configure to work with your Chalmers mail. Here's how: Thunderbird settings.

Backup

• Syncthing is a free program that is basically your own "cloud" service that you can store on your own computers. Since you only store on your own computers, the hard drive is the only thing that limits storage space. This way you can sync what you have on your work computer to your computer at home and you can set up automatic backup so you will always have the latest version also at home.