You may find these programs useful as you write your senior thesis!

Many of these programs are installed on some or all of the computers in 613 Altschul. 

Many useful programs are available for free or site-licensed download from CUIT or from the CU Library.

SciFinder Scholar 2007 is a standalone program for searching Chemical Abstracts.  Columbia has a site license for this program.  Installation can be tricky; follow the instructions for PC or Mac download and installation carefully!

Web of Science is a web-based interface for searching the Science Citation Index.  You must be connected to the CU network (or provide your UNI) to use this database.

EndNote is a very powerful bibliography package, also available via a Columbia site license.  The current version is EndNote 11.

ChemDraw is a powerful program for drawing chemical structures.  We do not have a site license, but the program is installed on the computers in 613 Altschul.  Students may install ChemDraw 10.0 on their computers for free courtesy of Columbia Chemistry.  See the email from Prof. Magyar for details.

Know It All from Bio-Rad is a FREE program that will perform many of the same functions as ChemDraw.  It is not as powerful as ChemDraw, but the price is right!

SpecViewer is a convenient program for looking at and printing spectra from various instruments, locating peaks, etc.  (It is particularly useful for spectra from the Aviv Cary-14.)  It used to be available for free download, but no longer.  We have old installation files if you would like to install it on your computer...see Prof. Chapman to borrow a CD!

Both Microsoft Word and Excel have important add-ons that are sometimes missing from a standard installation.  The Equation Editor in Word can be extremely useful.  Be sure it is installed!  In Excel, it is helpful to have the Analysis Tool-pak and the Solver; both should appear under the Tools menu.  If they are not listed, go to Add-Ins... under Tools to install them.

Matlab is a very powerful mathematical program that can be used for plotting, data analysis, kinetics fitting, and many other applications.  It is not particularly user-friendly, but the help files are very good.  It is installed on one computer in 613 Altschul.  See Prof. Magyar if you would like further information.

The PDB, or Protein Data Bank, is the international depository for protein structures determined by NMR or crystallography. Their are several excellent online tutorials on the PDB website...see the menu on the left side of the front page.

UCSF Chimera is a freely downloadable program for visualizing and analyzing protein crystal structures...and for making pretty figures of them!  The online tutorials and user’s guide are quite good.

The Cambridge Structural Database is the worldwide depository for small-molecule crystal structure data.  The software necessary to search this database is installed on the computers in 613 and 805 Altschul.  The CDs can be borrowed from the Columbia Chemistry Library if you would like to install the CSD software on your personal computer; ask at the desk.