Odontogram: caries, fillings and planned work
Last updated: 2026-07-31
Everything the odontogram tab of the free chart does: what each mark means, how the five surfaces work, and how a written procedure list comes out of it.
- Pick a treatment, pick a state, then click a tooth surface. Clicking the same spot again removes the mark.
- Grey for what is already there, green for what you plan, blue for what you have done.
- The drawing and the procedure list travel together, onto the PDF and into a link.
Quick start
Open the free chart and choose the Odontogram tab.
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Pick a treatment. Caries, Filling, Crown, Root canal and Extraction sit as chips along the palette.
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Pick a state. Existing, Planned or Completed, from the control beside them. Caries is the exception: it is something you observed rather than something you did, so its state control locks on Existing and the mark is always drawn red.
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Click a tooth surface. The mark appears in the colour of the state you chose. Clicking the same spot again removes it.
Clicking the chip that is already selected deselects it, and the chart goes read-only until you pick one again. That is how you hand a screen to a patient without a stray tap marking a tooth.
Reading the chart
Shape names the treatment, colour names the state.
- A filling fills the surface it sits on.
- Caries is a dot on the surface, always red.
- A crown is a heavy ring around the whole tooth with a light wash across it.
- A root canal is a filled disc in the middle of the tooth, the access cavity seen from above.
- An extraction is a cross through the tooth.
Grey is Existing, green is Planned, blue is Completed. Caries sits outside that scale entirely and carries no state.
Where one surface holds more than one restoration, the colour you see is the furthest along: completed beats planned, planned beats existing. Findings are drawn on top of everything else, so caries on a filled surface shows as a red dot over the filling instead of replacing it. An old filling you plan to replace shows as both.
The five surfaces
Every tooth is a box split into five zones: mesial, distal, the occlusal or incisal table in the middle, buccal, and lingual or palatal.
- M
- Mesial
- D
- Distal
- O
- Occlusal
- B
- Buccal
- P
- Palatal
- Crown
- Root canal
- Extraction
Which five a tooth has is worked out from its number, so you never choose them. Front teeth carry an incisal surface where back teeth carry an occlusal one, and lower teeth carry lingual where upper teeth carry palatal. Mesial is the side toward the midline, so it is on the right of the box in the upper right and lower right quadrants and on the left in the other two.
Crowns, root canals and extractions belong to the whole tooth rather than to one face of it. Pick one of those and the whole box becomes a single target.
Keyboard
The chart can be worked without the mouse. Click a tooth once, or press Tab until one is outlined, and the keys below take over.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tab | The next tooth, thirty-two stops around the mouth |
| ← → | Across the surfaces of this tooth, then on to the tooth beside it |
| ↑ ↓ | Up and down the surfaces of this tooth |
| Enter | Mark the surface the cursor is on |
| 1 2 3 | Existing, Planned, Completed |
Digits pick the state rather than letters, because the letter that would stand for a state changes with the language and because B, P and S already mean something on the charting tab. Missing and pontic teeth are skipped.
The Procedures table
Under the chart, Procedures lists the work you have marked: Tooth, Surfaces, Treatment, State, Code, Date and By.
Procedures
| Tooth | Surfaces | Treatment | State | Code | Date | By | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | MOD | Filling | Completed | F1 | 2026-05-04 | AB | |
| O | Caries | — | 2026-05-04 | AB | |||
| 26 | — | Crown | Planned | C3 | 2026-05-04 | AB |
A row gathers every mark sharing a tooth, a treatment, a state, a date and a clinician, so a filling across three surfaces of one tooth is one row reading MOD rather than three. Work recorded on different days stays on different rows, because those are different procedures. A finding has nothing to put in the State column, so that cell is simply empty.
Each row carries up to three controls:
- Mark completed appears on planned rows only. One click moves the row to Completed and re-dates it.
- Edit procedure opens a panel from the right, where the treatment, the state, the surfaces, the date and the clinician can all be changed. The tooth is deliberately not editable: surface sets differ from tooth to tooth, so moving a row would have to drop or remap surfaces. Remove the row and click the right tooth instead. The code is read-only there too, because it belongs to the treatment rather than to one row.
- Remove deletes the row and the marks behind it.
Switching a surface treatment to a tooth-level one collapses its surfaces into a single row. Clearing every surface would leave nothing to save, so Save is disabled rather than doing it quietly.
On a narrow screen the Code and By columns step aside and the table scrolls sideways. Both are still in the edit panel and on the PDF.
Dates and "By"
Every mark takes the chart's date and the practitioner name at the moment you click it, findings and existing work included. The date is when the row was recorded rather than a claim about when the work was done, which is why the column beside it reads By.
Changing the date on the Patient Info tab afterwards does not go back and re-stamp what is already marked. Edit procedure is where a past row is corrected.
Your codes
Customise, above the palette, holds one thing: the code your practice bills each treatment under. The five treatments themselves are fixed.
No fee schedule ships with the tool. Most of them are licensed and every country's is different, so the code column starts empty and you fill it in once. What you type is a practice preference held in this browser, in the same place as the FDI or 1-32 choice, and it is not part of any chart. It does travel when you send a chart to a colleague, because the codes are yours and nothing on the receiving side could reconstruct them.
Codes entered in one browser do not follow you to another.
Getting it out
Three exits sit above the chart, and again in the Keep this chart strip that appears under the list as soon as a tooth carries a mark.
- Download PDF on this tab produces the odontogram: the drawing, a legend of the treatments you used, and the procedure list with your codes. The charting tab produces the periodontal chart and its summary instead. The PDF is the tab you are on, so a referral needing both is two files.
- Send to a colleague turns the chart into a link and the odontogram goes with it. The recipient reads the five built-in treatments in their own language and your codes exactly as you typed them. How sharing works.
- Save Chart Data writes a file carrying the odontogram alongside the measurements, and Load Chart Data brings it back.
Storage note: nothing here is kept when you close the page and a reload clears it, exactly as on the periodontal chart. Send to a colleague is the one action that uploads a copy. Your treatment codes are a browser preference and stay in this browser. The rest of the free tool is covered in the periodontal chart guide.
Need help?
Email support@zermmi.com for onboarding, feedback, or troubleshooting.