The use of Mercury® Software on Mineral Chemistry and Mineralogy teaching. The crystallographic Mercury freeware, distributed in the internet by the CCDC, allows tridimensional visualization of mineral structures from CIF files, also permits: measurement of bond distances and angles and torsion angles; selection or exclusion of atoms; generation of X-ray powder diffraction diagrams; visualization of crystal hkl planes; of the unit cell and of selected portions of the crystal. It has been used for three years as a teaching resource in the course CQ-029, offered by the Chemistry Department to Geology major students of UFPR (Federal University of Paraná). The impacts of this methodology have been significant to the students’ understanding of the different silicate structures, the different types of ion coordination, the origin (and assignment) of X-ray diffraction peaks and the various types of solid solution.
