To help you in this course, here is a brief listing of free or relatively inexpensive computer programs.

A list of campus microlabs is available, along with information about their hours and number of computers.

You can purchase software at steep discounts through the University. See this page for details. Notice at the bottom that single user licenses of Microsoft Office are relatively cheap (as low as $52)!

3D Chemical Structure Drawing Programs

CrystalDesigner (Mac only) is used in this course to draw solid state structures, including polyhedral representations. A demo version is available. You can not print or copy structures, but you *can* save data and use all the other functions. This would enable you to work at home or elsewhere and only require you to come to campus to print or paste.

2D Chemical Structure Drawing Programs

• ISIS/Draw from MDL is completely free for academic or personal use and is fully functional. Available for Mac and Windows, it's a hard price to beat!
  
  
  
• ChemDraw Ltd from CambridgeSoft is available in Mac and Windows versions for $99 or less (note the option to click for special student pricing; sometimes they discount deeply!). A free non-printing, non-saving version is also available. They also offer a limited version of the entire ChemOffice suite (including Chem3D) for only $49.
  
  
  
• Bio-Rad (formerly SoftShell) offers ChemWindow for Windows machines, but you have to fill out a form to get student pricing. They also offer free ChemWeb (Mac and Windows) which will only output GIF quality images (72 dpi), which are great for web publishing but poor for anything else.