Some conditions give rise to the buttons which apply to Chemical operations being disabled. This is what the toolbar looks like in this scenario.

To find out why the buttons are disabled use the “Help” -> “Buttons Disabled …” menu item.

A message box such as below will be shown

There are several reasons why the chemistry operations are disabled

• You are running a beta version when a production release is available.
• Your version of Chem4Word is too old and MUST be updated.
• Your version of Microsoft Word is not activated or licenced.
• The document you have open is not editable.
• You have opened a document which is NOT in the latest document format (.docx) or it is in compatibility mode.
• Your cursor is located in a place in the document where insertion of our diagrams is not permitted (by Microsoft not us). These are the locations that we know about, there may be more. If you find additional ones that raise an exception please let us know on either GitHub or our Facebook group.
  • Insertion point is in Document Header
  • Insertion point is in Document Footer
  • Insertion point is in a Sub Document
  • Insertion point is in Foot note
  • Insertion point is in an Equation
  • Selection contains a line ending
  • Selection contains a Content control which is not a Rich Text or Picture Content Control
  • Selection contains more than one cell of a table
  • Selection contains more than one Content Control
  • Selection contains one or more Shape(s)
  • Document is in Co-Authoring mode

This is what the ribbon looks like normally when chemistry operations are permitted. The green box shows it in insert mode, the orange box shows it in edit mode.

If on start up of Word you see this “Update Available” screen (wording may differ slightly if you have a different release installed) then you need to uninstall Chem4Word V2.0.1.0 and replace it with V3.2 Release 2 (or later)

Click on “Update Now” 

This will download and run the latest installer. 

Click on “Yes” 

If you see the above UAC prompt click on “Yes”, this will un install version 2. 

The installer will now request that Word is closed. 

Please click on “Close without Save” 

Once you see this screen, click on “Install” 

Please tick the box to signify that you accept the Chem4Word licence., then click on “Install” 

Please click on Yes to install version 3.2 

Click on “Finish” to complete the setup. 

Click on “Finish” to complete the process. 

When you add chemistry into a paragraph the Add-In protects its contents by locking the Content Control which is inserted.

A bug exists in Microsoft Word (present in versions 2010, 2013 & 2016) which prevents adujsting of a paragrah’s formattting (such as centering etc) when the first “character” is a locked Content Control. This also applies to table cells and has been reported to the Miscosoft Office Team.

To get around this add a space before inserting a Chemistry object.

Before you import a structure from a file or web service, the add in checks to see if it is valid.

This is an example of an error during the import of a chemical structure from ChEBI:

You may also see a similar dialog when you try to import a structure:

The add in reports an error because the add in does not support an atom found in the import file.  The add in is able to import from many chemistry formats; not all of the atom and bond types that they contain are supported.