The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) Macromolecular Crystallography Computing School was held at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington between August 17 and 22, 1996. The School was the seventh in a series of IUCr Crystallographic Symposia. These are the scientific proceedings of that School. The School covered the developments in macromolecular X-ray crystallography, including, data collection, phasing model building, refinement, visualization, databases, data quality, data interpretation and software packages.