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Round trip |
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- For those using Office 2011 on Macs, it was possible to be able to drag and drop from Chemdraw into Word 2011 and drag and drop the image back into Chemdraw for editing. This is no longer the case for Office 2016.
- Dragging and dropping from ChemDraw 15.1 to Word 2016 will paste an image into the Word document but the image will NOT be editable
- Copying(⌘+C) and Pasting (⌘+V) will only paste text into Word(2016)
- IMPORTANT: Opening a old Office 2011 file in Office 2016 and resaving it will not affect the images already in the document (you can drag them into Chemdraw for editing). However, anything dragged into Office 2016 will still not be editable
Workarounds:
- Use paste as PDF instead of dragging and dropping. Copy the image from ChemDraw(⌘+C) and Paste it into Word 2016 using ⌘+Control+V instead of ⌘+V.
" editing ChemDraw figures embedded within Office 2016 documents sometimes does not behave as expected as Office versions change. Here's how to fix some problems |
Why you need this page
On a Mac, sometimes round trip editing with ChemDraw to and from MS Office applications work great, including the release of MS Office 2016 v15.x. However starting at least with MS Office 2016 v16.12, it we discovered it started to fail with just PowerPoint. It still worked fine with MS Word. Such changes might occur in the future at any time so we here document a work-around we hope will still work in the future.
A solution
If pasting into ChemDraw from MS Powerpoint results in a non-editable version of the image:
- First paste into Word
- Copy and paste back into ChemDraw
- The image should now be editable by ChemDraw
As seen in the past, this solution may unfortunately change in the near future. There are many places (Powerpoint, Word, or ChemDraw) where this can change with a newest version release. This solution currently works for MS Office 2016 v16.12
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Supporting Documentation
What we know
After viewing Clipboard information using Apple's ClipboardViewer, we found that image copied from ChemDraw, into Word, and back into ChemDraw contains the exact number of bytes, resulting in no quality loss. This was a concern as many posts on the internet had been reporting fuzziness, however this doesn't seem to be an issue for ChemDraw. Images are identical.
What we don't know
For some reason, when pasting into Powerpoint (either from ChemDraw or Word), the resulting image loses some bytes (in our test it went from 6835 to 4296). However, when pasting back into Word and subsequently ChemDraw, the original number of bytes are displayed. Perhaps MS Word converts the other remaining metadata from Powerpoint and rebuilds the original image? This tells us that even older images that have stopped working with roundtrip editing may be able to be "revived" by this Word conversion.
Blog post that gave some original guidance and introduced ClipboardViewer
Old ChemIT documentation - notes and history
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