7 Useful Excel Add-Ins That Make Life Easy, Fun, and More Productive
Excel doesn’t have to be as boring as evening traffic. These 7 useful Excel add-ins make it way more fun. You’ll increase your productivity so you can crush that spreadsheet, and help you study more effectively.
We use Excel for just about every project here, and we can honestly say if it weren’t for these add-ins, we’d fall asleep halfway through typing “VLOOKUP” every morning.
We asked around the office to see which add-ins were the most popular, effective, and fun. Then, we chose the 7 most astounding, stupefying, Earth-shattering plugins and divided them by category.
Enjoy!
Table of Contents
Kutools – Simplify Excel With Over 300 Advanced Functions
Kutools is a productivity godsend that helps us all get way more done in much less time. It’s a clear start to our 7 useful Excel add-ins list.
Instead of spending hours trying to figure out all of the complicated functions on your spreadsheet and clicking buttons just hoping you get it right, Kutools makes everything a matter of a few clicks. Check out how easy it makes your life:
- Snap: Take a snapshot of your current workbook, and one click restores it to that status instantly later on.
- Work Area Size: Toggle your work area size to find the right fit for your eyes. Want to hide the toolbar? Easy. Want to minimize the ribbon? Done.
- Combine Worksheets: Quickly combine multiple worksheets or workbooks into one workbook.
- Count Cells By Color: Quickly sum up cells based on background color.
It has hundreds of functions that help make Excel seamless and fast. Convert currencies, compare cells, prevent duplicates (the same as Excel’s Data Validation feature), and convert text to hyperlinks all at the click of a button.
It’s the ultimate Excel productivity hack!
Pickit Free Images Add-In – Add Images Directly Into Your Spreadsheets
Pickit makes it easy to inspire, perform, and persuade an audience using PowerPoint or Excel. It’s the fastest and easiest way to make professional presentations using stunning images and clipart. You can even choose from a number of awesome layouts.
After spending god knows how long searching for the perfect image for a spreadsheet, Pickit feels like a cheat code. Pickit shows up right next to your workbook with collections (think of them like photo albums) for you to choose from and even gives design suggestions for the perfect layout!
Our spreadsheets now stand out from every other company just because we take 30 seconds to choose an image. You can see why this is one of the 7 useful Excel add-ins you should be using.
Soda PDF Creator – Convert Spreadsheets to PDF Format in One Click
We swear we aren’t biased at all for choosing this one.
Sometimes, you need to convert your workbooks into PDF or vice versa to prevent data extraction.
When that time comes, Soda PDF is MUCH better than the built-in PDF converter on MS Office.
And it’s not just because we work in the office. Soda PDF is super easy and fast. It allows you to share in the cloud, it gives you access to eSign, and it lets you take control of your files by setting permissions, marking up spreadsheets, and giving you access on the go from anywhere.
Just install the Soda PDF MS Office add-in and you’re a click away from turning any spreadsheet into a PDF.
We know it’s a bit cheeky to add ourselves to a list of 7 useful Excel add-ins.
Bubble Charts – BUBBLES!
Excel is one of the most boring, monotonous programs in existence. Bubble charts changes all of that!
Now instead of that boring cell-formatted spreadsheet, you can visualize data in the world’s most fun and exciting way: BUBBLES.
Bubble charts represents your data in bubbles of different sizes and colors. Once you select a table of data, it creates a bubble for each data set based on how often that distinct value appears. It’s a great way to analyze complex data sets in a fun and interactive way.
Excel Training and Tips – Go to Excel University and Level up
Excel is so complex that there are entire training modules just to figure out how to use it. The truth is, even they aren’t enough to learn half of the functions available. We thought something educational was fitting for a list on 7 useful Excel add-ins.
The Excel Training and Tips add-in gives you access to training videos, how-to cheat sheets, quizzes (that you won’t do), and exercise files.
This course is taught by Microsoft MVP and Excel guru, Ken Puls, so you know you’re getting hard-hitting Excel knowledge bombs.
By the time you’re done with the 3+ hours of videos, the entire office will be coming to you with their Excel problems. Have fun.
TIP: Already decent at Excel? Take the knowledge test and see which areas you need the most work on. That’ll help you skip all of the boring stuff you already EXCEL at (yes, we just did that. No regrets #YOLO.).
F9 Financial Solutions – Simplify Your Finances!
If your financial reporting is as eye-gougingly boring as it is complex, the F9 add-in can simplify the complex ins and outs of your finances.
It links your general ledger to MS Excel so you can visualize real-time data at the push of a button.
Use it to create dynamic, reusable reports to free up more time for analysis and strategic planning.
Basically, it’s a tool that adds a ton of functions into Excel to help it access your general ledger and provide more options for financial analysis, forecasting, budgeting, and planning.
And, it’s all based on Excel functionality, so you don’t have to learn anything new.
SEOgadget – All of Your SEO Data in One Place
SEOgadget is the whitehat SEO’s dream. It connects directly to Moz and Majestic SEO via their API and lets you organize all of your SEO data in one place for quick viewing and analysis.
Now you can see how your site is performing with all of the added benefits of Excel functions for organization, analysis, and sharing.
The problem with these search marketing platforms is that most SEOs waste hours of time exporting data to Excel spreadsheets for easy viewing. SEO Gadget solves that problem. Now all of your data can be exported with a single click.
Use the time you save to focus on your blac…oops…WHITEHAT SEO campaigns.
Excel is boring and tedious, but it doesn’t have to be. With these Excel add-ins, you can make MS Excel fun, easy, and way more effective. And, you’ll get bubble charts.
That brings us to the end of our list of 7 useful Excel add-ins.
Download the Soda PDF now and get the Excel plug-in as you start your FREE trial!
