Copying-and-Pasting an OLE object pastes an image instead

[Hastur]

My apologies if this is a known issue, but a forum search did not find anything related.

I am using FileMaker as a database to store information about chemical structures. These structures are stored as ChemDraw OLE objects embedded in a Container field. I do not believe this problem is exclusive to ChemDraw objects, however.

In FileMaker 6, I could copy-and-paste these structures into an OLE-aware document (e.g. a Word or Excel document) and the object itself would be pasted. That's the desired behavior.

Now, in FM8.5, these objects copy-and-paste as images. If I try to Paste Special, there is no option available which will paste the OLE object. I can find no Copy option to make sure they copy as an object.

I do know that the structures are actually stored in the container as OLE objects and not as images. For example, I can work around the problem by dragging the object from the Container field to another document, where it is then placed as a true object, not just an image. (Unfortunately this actually moves the object; I want to copy it instead, so it's not viable for me.) It's only when clicking Copy (or Ctrl+C) and Paste (or Ctrl+V) that the problem occurs. The issue first started occurring after the upgrade to FM8.5, and after some troubleshooting I do believe it's a FileMaker issue rather than a ChemDraw issue.

Has anyone encountered this problem with OLE objects embedded in containers and found a good solution?

[sflinux]

Did you ever find a solution?

I've been using Filemaker Server 5.5. with Filemaker Pro 6 Clients and it works well with Chemdraw Version 7. We just upgraded to Filemaker Server 11 and Filemaker Pro 11 and now I am experiencing the same problem as you. All pictures pasted from Chemdraw into Filemaker Pro 11 are pictures. When you copy from Filemaker back into Chemdraw, all you paste is a picture file, which is not useful.

[sflinux]

Well we just bought version 12 of Chemdraw which solved our problem. On a mac, I can copy/paste seamlessly between Chemdraw and Filemaker. I did learn that new version of Filemaker (7 on) store lots of data in the container field. If you have trouble getting the native data, you can export data from the container, which is useful, but not as convenient as copy/paste between multiple applications.