Mercury Self-Help

Owned by David Blood
Last updated: Aug 15, 2024 by David Blood
2 min read

What is Mercury?

Mercury is a program for visualizing crystal structures in three dimensions, and or analyzing the results of ConQuest substructure searches, or to investigate other data sets, which may be read in from .csv (comma-separated value) or.tsv (tab-separated value)

What to do before installing Mercury

  1. First, you must make an account. Go to the following link: https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/account/login/register?returnUrl=%2Fsolutions%2Fcsd-system%2Fcomponents%2Fmercury%2F

  2. You can use your Geneseo account or any other account to register

Troubleshooting:

  • If you see the icon below, wait about 24 hours and then try to log in with the credentials that you set up for Mercury. It should allow you to log in.

How to install Mercury on macOS

Step 1: Install XQuartz

  1. Go to the following link: https://www.xquartz.org/

  2. Click on the link to download

  3. Open the download file

  4. Double-click XQuartz.pkg

  5. Follow the on-screen installation instructions to install XQuartz

Step 2: Install Mercury

  1. Go to the following link: https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/support-and-resources/downloads/

  2. Click on Mercury (incorporating enCIFer)

  3. Click the Download link for Mercury macOS

  4. You may need to Authenticate with the Account information you created from CCDC

  5. Click Agree & Download

  6. Open the downloaded file

  7. Open mercurystandalone-osx-installer

  8. Go through the setup

  9. Launch Mercury

How to install Mercury on Windows

  1. Go to the following link: https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/support-and-resources/downloads/

  2. Click on Mercury (incorporating enCIFer)

  3. Click Download for the most current version of Mercury (Windows)

  4. Click Agree & Download

  5. Open the downloaded .exe file to install the software

  6. Accept the default installer options by selecting the "Next" button prompt during the install

  7. Mercury will create a desktop shortcut , when launched for the first time, you will need to Activate the software

    1. To do this, when the activation screen comes up at the end of the install process you will have to click on the Activate CSD-Community tab and then click Activate.

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