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:

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.

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.

This post shows you how to merge your existing structure V3 library into V2020 essential oils library.

1. Export your existing structures to a folder by clicking on the Chem4Word “Options” button.

2. Select the library tab and click on the “Export” button.

3. Chose a folder to export them to. Here I have created a folder called “C:\Users\Mike\Library”.

4. When “Select Folder” is clicked you should see a progress bar at the bottom of the form as shown below.

5. Once the export is completed you will see a dialog similar to the following.

6. Select the “Maintenance” Tab and click on the “Open” button for the library.

7. Once the folder has opened you can backup the file “Library.db”, then delete it.

8. Close all running copies of Microsoft Word. If in doubt re-boot your PC after the above step.

9. Start Microsoft Word, Select the Chemistry Tab, then click on the “Open” Library button and you should see that the new Essential Oils database has been installed. In the image below the button’s caption has been changed to close as the library is open.

10. You can now import and merge the structures from your previous library by clicking on the “Options” button. Select the “Library” tab, then click on the “Import” button.

11. Select the folder you previously exported your library to.

12. You will be required to confirm the import operation.

13. While working you will see a progress bar at the bottom of the form as shown below.

14. Congratulations, you have now merged the two libraries.

You can now upgrade to the latest version of Chem4Word! Download it from here and see the new features.

Library

The Chemistry Add-In for Microsoft Word now comes with a pre-loaded structure library from CEVOpen – This data represents about 2100 unique chemical names of volatile plant chemicals (essential oils) from the EssoilDB 1.0 database (compiled from the scientific literature over about 10 years in Dr Yadav’s laboratory). They are made available for re-use by anyone for any purpose (CC0). We would appreciate acknowledgement of EssoilDB and the following people who extracted and cleaned the data during 2019. (Gitanjali Yadav, Ambarish Kumar, Peter Murray-Rust).

The new library is default for brand new installations, but if you already have a library of your own, installing the latest release will leave your library in place.

ACME

You’ve already read that we have a new editor. The editor allows us to create new features in future versions. We’re looking at a number of opportunities to improve Chem4Word. As an example, we’re looking to include the drawing of chemical reactions.

The future

We’re in the process of making some video tutorials of the new features, and we’ll post these as soon as we can.

Meanwhile, keep in touch via our Facebook group where you will hear first about the new features and video tutorials.

And as always, Chem4Word is free and will remain so.  What are you waiting for?  Download it now!

The Chemistry Add-In for Microsoft Word now comes with a pre-loaded structure library from CEVOpen https://github.com/petermr/CEVOpen – This data represents about 2100 unique chemical names of volatile plant chemicals (essential oils) from the EssoilDB 1.0 database (compiled from the scientific literature over about 10 years in Dr Gita Yadav’s laboratory). They are made available for re-use by anyone for any purpose (CC0). We would appreciate acknowledgement of EssoilDB and the following people who extracted and cleaned the data during 2019. (Gitanjali Yadav, Ambarish Kumar, Peter Murray-Rust).

The new library is default for brand new installations, but if you already have a library of your own, installing the latest release will leave your library in place.

If you want the new library and to keep the structures from your existing library, we’ll provide instructions on how to do that shortly after release.