What’s New in ChemDraw® and ChemOffice® version 18.1

This release continues ChemDraw’s lengthy history of delivering innovative capabilities that give you back the time you need to make breakthrough discoveries.

18.1 builds on the 17.x and 18.0 and addresses some requests. Here are the key enablers in this release:

  • More hotkeys! We continue to make ChemDraw the most efficient application on the market and expedite the chemical drawing process for our users with new hotkeys. The Tab/Shift+Tab keys allow for instant selection and navigation to neighboring molecules without touching the mouse. A long-standing request from medicinal chemists has been the ability to assign a trifluoromethyl group in one keystroke, which is now available through the “Shift+F” command.
  • To address another request of Lead Discovery users and organic chemists in general, ChemDraw 18.1 now offer the possibility to toggle/enforce a Kekule representation of aromatic cycles when the input is a non-Kekule (i.e. delocalized) representation. This feature is available as a new Preference and defaults to a localized (Kekule) representation of the molecule. “Alt+K” is a new shortcut to toggle the aromatic electrons display for molecules that are already drawn.
  • The Search into Reaxys capability now comes with a URL proxy option to direct the structure search into a customer-specific instance of the Reaxys website, as is the case at certain commercial or academic accounts.
  • The HELM toolbar supports the latest Pistoia Alliance Format, and each monomer entry now displays up to 6 characters of the monomer nickname. The overall design is more compact for better screen real estate management.
  • ChemDraw Add-ins introduced in version 17.1 can now be dynamically downloaded for a controlled delivery of custom functionalities. A local folder or URL can be specified in the Preferences to act as a repository for dynamically accessed JSON files that provide additional capabilities in ChemDraw.
  • Chem3D Ultra 18.1, part of ChemOffice Professional, is compatible with the latest versions of GAMESS 18, Gaussian 16W and MOPAC 2016 for 3rd party calculations.