ChemFormatter

ChemFormatter is a free, specialized productivity add-in designed to instantly automate the tedious styling of chemical formulas, stoichiometry, and equations within Microsoft Office. Created by Kazuya Ujihara, it functions as a lightweight plugin for Microsoft Word and Excel, allowing scientists, educators, and students to focus entirely on writing instead of manual text formatting. Core Features

Automatic Subscripts & Superscripts: Instantly converts plain typed text like “H2O” or “SO42-” into correctly formatted notation ( H2Ocap H sub 2 cap O SO42−cap S cap O sub 4 raised to the 2 minus power

Charge and Isotope Formatting: Intelligently handles valence charges, chemical bonds, and mass numbers (such as

Multi-Platform Compatibility: Available as an Office COM add-in on Windows and as an Office macro/template file on macOS.

Multi-Selection Processing: Formats plain text inside paragraphs, shapes, or entire multi-row tables in roughly a second. Workflow Integration

The tool fixes a major bottleneck in scientific writing—the continuous interruption of using shortcuts or the Equation Editor to manually apply subscript styling.

Draft in Plain Text: Write your thesis, lab report, or journal article naturally, typing chemical terms out as raw numbers and letters.

Highlight & Convert: Select the targeted block of text or the entire document.

One-Click Formatting: Click the execution button in the dedicated ChemFormatter ribbon tab. The plugin automatically processes text strings and applies the correct chemical font styles. Availability and Caution

The open-source code and installers are hosted on the ChemFormatter GitHub Repository and ChemFormatter SourceForge.

Note: Because the add-in parses numbers based on chemical conventions, it can occasionally misinterpret and format commercial trade names or alphanumeric codes that contain numbers. Reviewing your final text after mass-formatting is highly recommended.

If you are setting this up, please let me know which operating system (Windows or Mac) and Office version you are using so I can guide you through the correct installation steps! Format chemical equations instantly with ChemFormatter