Chemistry Add-in for Word

This add-in allows representing chemical data within an MS Word document. It makes writing, editing and manipulating chemical data representations within an MS Word file a really simple and easy job, if you manage to install it first.

Installing and making it work can be quite a struggle, especially if you are a rather inexperienced user. First of all, you need to make sure you have the right version of MS Office installed on your system. Having the supported MS Office 2007 or 2010 versions won’t suffice, as they have to be updated to specific Service Packs (SP 1 or SP 2 for MS Office). Anyway, once you perform this Office update, things might still be far from over. In many cases, additional Knowledge Base packages have to be downloaded and installed, especially on MS Office 2007, to make the add-in show up in the MS Word’s ribbon. When you manage to make it appear in the MS Word’s ribbon, you can finally relax and start using it.

It comes with a handy gallery of chemical representations that include 2D formulas, but the content of this gallery provided by default is rather scarce. Only a few chemical elements are already represented, the others have to be added by the users. On the other hand, the fact that it also allows the creation and management of inline “chemical zones” within the document is a really nice and handy advantage.

To sum it all up, adding chemical information to an MS Word document can be done with ease thanks to this add-in, as it allows inserting and manipulating labels, formulas, and 2-D depictions right within the document in a really convenient manner. Despite its complicated installation, I like this add-in as it can prove to be of undeniable help to those needing to handle chemical data using MS Word, and it’s also free.