Chemistry Add-In for Microsoft Word

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Chem4Word in Office Online

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What is Office Online?

You often ask us, ‘why doesn’t Chem4Word work in Office Online apps?’  After all, you would be able to use it on any platform that supported them. Such as Apple Mac, used by many chemists in preference to Windows.

A Bit of History

The answer is complicated and lies in the history of Chem4Word.  It started collaborative project between Microsoft Research and Cambridge University more than ten years ago.  If you wanted to develop a Word add-in at that time,  you had two options. 

First, you could write it in Visual Basic for Applications.  This is great for quick, relatively unsophisticated customisations, such as custom templates or dialog boxes.

But Chem4Word demanded a lot more from the platform. So it used Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).  VSTO, pronounced ‘visto’, ties Word and other Office apps into the .NET Framework using the C# programming language.  This unleashes the full power of Windows, including sophisticated graphics and XML handling. This is just what was needed to power Chem4Word.   

The Present

A lot has changed since it was first written.  Microsoft sank more resources into developing the cloud-based versions of Office and now embraces JavaScript as a development language.  It’s bringing its online APIs into line with the VSTO-supported APIs. There will soon be little to choose from them.

But, and this is a very big ‘but’: JavaScript is a very different language to C#.  Despite being ‘the programming language of the Web’, it is arguably a poor relation and does things very differently.  Translating our tens of thousands of lines of code from C# to JavaScript is a huge task!  JavaScript’s graphics capabilities come second to the native Windows platform. For instance, ACME would be difficult to reproduce using the HTML canvas:

Ecce ACME!

The Office Online development platform is also limited. We can’t easily access compound libraries downloaded to the computer.  The security restrictions of running in a web browser put paid to that, and other features! Office Online add-ins can only interact with the user through task panes. It’s difficult to shoehorn all our functionality into those.

A brief Overview of Office Add-ins | by Peter Wasonga Ombwa | Medium
A task pane in action

What Now?

Microsoft have pledged continued support for VSTO-based applications. So, for now we will dedicate our development resources to enhancing Chem4Word on this platform.  Our new ACME editor will allow us to add exciting new features, like reactions and structural templates, while maintaining the full Chem4Word experience that you know and value. 

We will still be closely watching how the new Office Developer story unfolds.  When we are happy that we can take what we have done to the new online platform, with minimal effort, hassle and degradation of functionality, then we will provide a Chem4Word that’s as fully-featured and easy to use online as it is on your desktop!

As a final comment, with the web version of Word, you can open, read and edit documents containing Chemistry that were created with the desktop version of Word without losing the Chemistry components.

What’s coming up in Version 3 – A user perspective

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A completely new version of Chem4Word

We have been working on a new version of the Chemistry addin for Microsoft Word and we’d like to show our progress so far.  The new Ribbon and Library are shown in the picture below.  We also have a new version of the Chemistry Navigator and a replacement for the old Gallery, now called the Library.

Why a completely new version?

We decided it was time to take stock.  It’s about ten years since Chem4Word was first released.  A lot has happened since then, and we wanted to make sure we could meet both present and future challenges.

What has been our approach?

We had a long discussion among the team about what direction we should take after we released the last version.  We came up with two possibilities:

  1. Enhance performance: make the product more reliable and stable, and re-write some of the code to allow it to be properly extendable.
  2.  Concentrate on providing new features

We could have followed both of these approaches  But it made more sense to put the product on a firmer footing before we built anything new onto it.

What did we do?

So, what have we done to improve the product?  Well the first thing we did was to listen to your feedback and address some longstanding gripes.

You complained about the idiosyncratic ways that Chem4Word stored its stuff in a Word document template.  So we dealt with those issues first.  Then we went on to address performance problems.  We also had some issues with the way that the Gallery and Navigator displayed structures as low-quality pictures.

You should find the new version of Chem4Word familiar. Most of the old features are still there.  We’ve just made them work much better!  And we’ve got rid of those you didn’t like or didn’t use.

Better Storage means Better Editing and Better Performance!

Our first step was to change the way that the chemistry information is stored inside the Word document, before it is presented to you in the form of a structure/label or formula in the document.  A radical change to the storage model means that you can now copy and paste structures inside a document and even between documents.

We also addressed the performance of the code that generates the structures that you see in your documents.  By changing the way the add-in works with the chemistry information in the document, we have made it very much quicker to render more complex structures with larger numbers of atoms and bonds.  To give you an idea of the speed improvement, have a look at this video that compares the performance of the current add-in with the version currently in development.

FlexDisplay

Because it’s now much easier and quicker to work with the chemistry directly, this opens up all sorts of exciting new possibilities.  On-screen rendering is now much easier than it was, so we don’t have to rely on storing the low quality bitmaps of the structure for the Gallery and Navigator tools.

We have used this new tool, the FlexDisplay in the new Navigator and the new Library to get high quality display of chemical structures in these two tools.

New Navigator

We completely overhauled the Navigator.  This lists all the chemistry in the current document, and allowing you to paste copies and links to embedded chemistry.  The new version does much the same as the old one.  It also includes new Browse buttons.  These allow you to locate and show all the instances of a given chemical within the document.

 

Old Navigator New Navigator

As you can see, it follows the new-look Office style.  It also uses the FlexDisplay to display chemistry, making the display much clearer (and quicker).  See how much clearer  and more colourful the structures are compared to the old-style Navigator.

Goodbye Gallery – Hello Library!

The Library in Action

One of the biggest gripes you had about the way Chemistry for Word worked was that it replaced the document’s template with it’s own version, thus eliminating any styles and other customizations you had done.

You hated this, so we have completely removed the Gallery and replaced it with a new component: the Library.  The Library superficially resembles the Gallery, but as you can see above it lives in its own task pane, flanking the document along with the Navigator.  You can save structures to the Library, change their names, and insert them wherever you want to in your document.  This is handy when you are constantly referring back to a core set of structures, say, when preparing teaching materials.

Best of all, the Library doesn’t use any templates to store its structures, so you won’t lose any document customizations that you have already made.

We hope you like the look of the changes that we’ve made and we expect to be able to release a version for you to try very soon.

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We’re moving to the .NET Foundation

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dotnet_logoThe Chem4Word Project began in 2008 as a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge.  The project’s original instigators, Tony Hey and Peter Murray-Rust, intended to add the capability to create and edit chemical structures within the world’s most popular word processor, Microsoft Word.  This was novel enough in itself, but the ‘Chemistry Add-In for Word’ was intended to be an open source project, a radical departure for Microsoft.

Eight years on, Microsoft has since placed and supported many products into and in the open-source domain, and Chem4Word still flourishes.  Although we are a small volunteer team we have just released a major update, with dramatically improved chemical structure rendering.  Chem4Word has been downloaded over 200,000 times and has users all over the world.

We are currently planning new features that will make Chem4Word even more powerful and easy to use.  We are also optimising the storage model, which will lead eventually to performance improvements.

To help support these new developments, we are transferring ownership of the code base to the .NET Foundation.  We give our heartfelt thanks to the support that we have received from the OuterCurve Foundation over the past 8 years, and the guidance of Microsoft Research and Cambridge University.  None of this would have been possible without their original vision.

We look forward greatly to working with the .NET Foundation, in helping to develop Chem4Word into the leading freely-available, open-source cheminformatics tool.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed in whatever way to this project!

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