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The educational value of three-dimensional crystal structures in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is discussed in the context of practical use cases and the availability of a free teaching subset of the CSD that can be used in conjunction with WebCSD, an application that provides internet access to CSD information content., The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is a vast and ever growing compendium of accurate three-dimensional structures that has massive chemical diversity across organic and metal–organic compounds. For these reasons, the CSD is finding significant uses in chemical education, and these applications are reviewed. As part of the teaching initiative of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), a teaching subset of more than 500 CSD structures has been created that illustrate key chemical concepts, and a number of teaching modules have been devised that make use of this subset in a teaching environment. All of this material is freely available from the CCDC website, and the subset can be freely viewed and interrogated using WebCSD, an internet application for searching and displaying CSD information content. In some cases, however, the complete CSD System is required for specific educational applications, and some examples of these more extensive teaching modules are also discussed. The educational value of visualizing real three-dimensional structures, and of handling real experimental results, is stressed throughout.

A new piece of software for statistical analysis of geometrical, chemical and crystallographic data within the Cambridge Structural Database System is described. This software has been written specifically to deal with chemical structure data and crucially provides simultaneous visualization of the three-dimensional structural information., A collection of new software tools is presented for the analysis of geometrical, chemical and crystallographic data from the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). This software supersedes the program Vista. The new functionality is integrated into the program Mercury in order to provide statistical, charting and plotting options alongside three-dimensional structural visualization and analysis. The integration also permits immediate access to other information about specific CSD entries through the Mercury framework, a common requirement in CSD data analyses. In addition, the new software includes a range of more advanced features focused towards structural analysis such as principal components analysis, cone-angle correction in hydrogen-bond analyses and the ability to deal with topological symmetry that may be exhibited in molecular search fragments.