After a long absence I climbed onto the Bruker 300 NMR and locked in for some actual lab work. Expecting to just to shim up and hit “zg”, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the software had finally been updated. Topspin had been loaded and with it a new and improved graphic user interface. Wow. I feel like I have come out of a long walk in the forests of Mordor and into a garden party. I’m sure there are better systems out there, but this will do nicely for a while.
Lamentations on Chemistry
Editorials of a Scientist Political
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Look at the Bruker keyboard. If among the up, down, left, and right arrows there is a diagonal arrow key… DON’T TOUCH IT! It destroys the world.
In the past there was good reason to be careful with your keystrokes on a Bruker. I seem to recall that “ctrl L” was a screen format toggle and “ctrl K” was something much more drastic. Naturally K and L are together on the QWERTY board.
As a graduate student TOPSPIN is a great program. You can export spectra as PDF and take those to publication, no scanning. Also, if you title your spectra with a consistent system (e.g. name, notebook #, pg#, LOC-II-123) you can use the edit->find option to search for spectra very easily! No more looking through piles of hardcopies. There is some basic multiplet analysis as well (not awesome) but it can save time if you have clean spectrum and just need J and ppm values.
I say all this because I’ve had to show enough grad students writing up how to take advantage of these things, so just in case some people need to know.
Hey, thanks for the heads up. The pdf export is truly cool. I have to find this feature.
Go to File->Print, Click on the print with layout – start Plot Editor option. From there size up you spectrum, include the acquisition parameters, compound (you can paste from ChemDraw) and whatever else. Then go to File->Export. PDF is one of the options in the drop down list. Worked out great for my publication.
If you need anymore tips, just contact me. It really is a great program, I would like to try others but it cost me $110 already. If anyone has tried Mestrelab Research products and can offer a comparison let me know. TOPSPIN’s use of Java is kind of a downside since it makes the search function very slow when you have a lot of spectra in one folder.
Personally, I really like JEOL’s Delta software. It works great, takes Varian, Bruker and JEOL raw data. You can print pdf’s to your hearts content. Best of all – its free.
Also runs under windows, mac and linux OS.
Anything more you could want?
Download and install it on your pc and you can look at all your spectra at your leisure…
It’s free? I tried downloading a copy of that. I can’t find the link to download it, even after registering with JEOL. Looks like it takes license keys also. So I may be doing something wrong, but it doesn’t look free.
Never mind. It just takes awhile for their systems to update my profile so I can download it. Kind of weird.
Well, I was referring to JEOL software from the early 1990’s. I’m sure they got religion and improved it greatly.