Anyone who has had to store or search a collection of chemical structures rapidly realises that they need a software tool with a little chemical intelligence. Whilst there are a number of commercial databases they tend to be rather expensive and often require a knowledge of SQL or dedicated IT support. Fine for large corporations but not suitable for a single chemist or small group. In contrast FileMaker Pro is a popular desktop database with an easy to use interface (there are also server and mobile versions). Unfortunately whilst it is easy to use it does not support chemical structure based searching. Fortunately FileMaker Pro comes with an easy to use scripting interface and we can create scripts that run command line applications like Openbabel.

This tutorial shows how to add substructure and similarity searching to a FileMaker Pro database, full details are available here including download of example database.