The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) provides many free programs that can be used to view and manipulate crystal structures. Additionally, they have made a subset of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) available for teaching purposes and many educational activities have been created to go along with this teaching subset (see link below). This teaching subset can be freely viewed through the WebCSD interface or can be used in the freely-available Mercury program. (Mercury is avaliable for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems.)

Of the 786 structures in most recent version of the Teaching Subset (2020.1.1), 311 structures contain metals in a variety of structures and in a number of different geometries. One drawback to this dataset is that the structures were not indexed by the CCDC until recently and it is difficult to determine which structures in the database could be useful in teaching a particular topic. (The CCDC annotated list of strucutres in the Teaching Subset can be found at https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/Community/educationalresources/teaching-database/.

This spreadsheet contains a detailed annotated listing of all of the 311 metal-containing structures in the teaching subset. This speadsheet provides much more in-depth information about each structure than the CCDC spreadsheet and is focused on inorganic chemistry topics. The code, name, metal center, metal coordination number and geometry, ligands, and general comments are provided for each structure. This document will be a living document and will be updated as the Teaching Subset is updated.

Note: The attached spreadsheet has been updated to reflect the contents of the most recent version of the Teaching Subset (2020.1.1). This most recent version includes many newly-added structures that highlight different geometric arrangements that are discussed in inorganic texts and additional MOF structures that display framework catenation isomerism (interpenetrated chains).