An excellent database program that is tailored to storing notes, chemical structures and NMR files. ChemFinder for Excel, is an add on for Excel turning your spreadsheet into a powerful compound retrieval and manipulation system it deserves a review of its own. There have been a number of quite excellent and detailed reviews on ChemDraw Ultra highlighting its especial suitability for handling reaction mechanisms and stereochemistry, and consequently I have decided to focus not so much on ChemDraw s many features, but instead on its use in the ChemOffice suite s management of chemical information. It should be observed that compared to other chemical structure drawing packages, ChemDraw is clearly geared to publishing, and many of its features such as font setting, and tabulation might not be of primary interest to school students or their teachers, unless they were presenting a paper, in which case this is made easy by the provision of templates with typographical parameters preset according to journal. The one niggle I have is with the handling of structures is that there is no button to take a selected bond and orientate the molecule vertically or horizontally.
Orientation is manual using a rotate tag on a selected molecule, which can be slower.
Moving from other programs after allowing for a different environment, some of the operations seem less intuitive. However, once through the tutorial, and you recognise the added power ChemDraw has. There are a good many typographical features that have given ChemDraw the well-deserved reputation as a publishing tool par excellence. Most of these features are redundant for day to day or casual use. ChemDraw provides a standard interface for drawing, editing, moving, orienting and cleaning up structures.