Only six months since our last announcement and downloads of our popular freeware structure drawing software have achieved another impressive milestone. On January 20th, the 300,000th copy of ACD/ChemSketch version 5 freeware was downloaded from our web site. This signals a continuation of the daily average of 300 downloads and supports ACD/ChemSketch as one of the premier molecular structure drawing software packages available today.

The commercial ACD/ChemSketch package allows integration with ACD/ChemPalm and ACD/ChemPocket for the Palm® and Pocket PC platforms. ACD/Labs has now integrated our new freeware column selection tool with ChemSketch as well. ACD/Column Selector for Windows® is built as a fully functional ACD/ChemBasic macro for freeware ChemSketch and allows you to locate the most appropriate column for your separation by searching a knowledge base of 135 of the most utilized columns. Download Column Selector for Windows or Palm (for use on OS-based PDAs).

The worldwide web has truly been the enabling technology in allowing the worldwide distribution of ChemSketch according to the statistical map below. We have confirmed users of ChemSketch, not just downloaders, in such far-flung places as Cote d'Ivoire, the Cook Islands, the Wallis and Fortuna Islands, Uzbekistan, Tonga, Paraguay, and Qatar, to name just a few.

Number of downloads per million inhabitants:

	Brown	more than 300
	Red	100 - 300
	Yellow	30 - 100
	Light green	10 - 30
	Dark green	less than 10

The commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch, version 7.0, provides a series of significant enhancements relative to the Freeware. These include structure searching of documents containing molecular structures, support of Markush structures and polymers, and direct export of Adobe PDF files to produce structure-searchable PDF files. The commercial software also includes a Dictionary containing over 100,000 names and many new templates of glassware and chemical classes. The commercial software can be purchased by contacting us or a distributor in your area.

We expect that ChemSketch will continue its steady ascent toward becoming the premier chemical structure software and that feedback from our users will continue to motivate us to innovate and improve its capabilities. Visit us soon to find out about what's new in Version 8! As it is, we are proud to have benefited the scientific community with one of the best chemical structure drawing tools available today!