Draw chemical structure of any molecule using this free Ms Word add-in/plugin.

Microsoft Word is the best tool for writing and formatting text for your academics. Writing chemical reaction and associated symbols in word like various kinds of arrows in Word as easy (like in LaTeX) but what if you want to insert a chemistry formula or diagram of a molecule?. You know how difficult it is to draw them using Shapes available in Ms Word. Drawing complex chemical structure is not supported by Ms Word straight out of the box.

There are tons of paid and free software like ChemSketch etc. in the market that facilitates drawing chemical structure. But no one comes close to Chem4Word in ease of drawing and speed. Also, this software integrates seamlessly with Ms Word.

This software is available as plugin. This free plugin adds support for entering and editing chemistry symbols, diagrams, and formulas using intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI). Be it a simple molecule like water or little complex molecule like “Benzene” ring to a very complicated molecule like “sildenafil citrate”, drawing its chemical structure is very easy.

Table of Contents

Chem4Word plugin

Developer

The Chemistry Add-In for Microsoft Word is a chemistry-aware add-in for Microsoft Word, which is sponsored and supported by the .NET Foundation. Microsoft Research and Drs. Peter Murray-Rust and Joe Townsend of the University of Cambridge’s Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics initially developed the open source Chem4Word project. The two organizations assigned the project to the Outercurve Foundation in February 2011.

Features of Chem4Word

The Chem4Word add-in allows the user to interact with chemistry in a document as follows

Edit / draw your structures using an embedded open source chemical structure editor called ChemDoodle Web Sketcher.
Edit textual descriptors for a structure.
Import chemical structures from web services such as PubChem and Opsin.
Import files in CML or MDL Molfile format.
Export drawn or imported structures in CML or MDL Molfile format. You can use this option to copy drawings to other documents of share them with colleagues

The Chem4Word add-in stores the chemical structures as Chemical Mark-up Language (CML) in the aforementioned Custom XML Parts, then renders the structure inside a Custom Control using Drawing ML. The Chem4Word add-in also allows the user to depict the structure by one of its textual descriptors. When you edit a chemistry structure and save the results, all of its linked visualizations are also updated.

Installing Chem4Word plugin in Ms Word.

Prerequisite

This plugin requires the following

Ms Office: Office 2010, Office 2013 or Office 2016.
Operating System: Windows 7 or later.
All operating systems must have the latest Windows updates installed.
NET Framework 4.5.2 (You can download it for free from https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=42642, may require windows restart )

Installation Procedure

Download Chem4word Plugin from for free from here
Run Chem4Word-Setup.exe: This will automatically download and install the required prerequisite / software like.
a. Visual Studio Tool for office run time
b. Chemistry Add-in for Microsoft word.
Enjoy!!!

If you do all the steps correctly, then you should see Chemistry Ribbon in your Ms Word.

Draw chemical structure in Word

To draw chemical structure, Click “Chemistry tab” where you will find the option to draw, navigate or import.

Navigate chemical structure

After installing plugin, your database will be pre-populated with some molecules. If the molecule you want to draw is available offline database of this plugin, you can directly use it. Navigation base looks something like this.

It allows you to draw any chemical symbols from easy to use and intuitive GUI as shown in figure below. You can draw simple and complex molecule. But this is not the recommend this way of drawing chemical structure. Because 99.9% of all the chemical structure are available in library. Be it a simple molecule like water or little complex like Benzene or a very complex molecule like paracetamol or Sildenafil Citrate. Structure of all these molecules could be imported.

Import chemical structure

If the molecule you want to draw is not available in offline database / Navigate panel, then you can import it online. You can draw a chemical structure of a molecule by importing structure from the following three online database.

PubChem Database
ChEBI Database
Opsin Database

To import, just click on Import and then select any of the following database and type the desired molecule in search bar. I just tried to draw the chemical structure of “sildenafil citrate” molecule and I just got it on the fly using import option.