12 Useful Excel Add-Ins for Small to Medium Business

Excel Add ins enable users to extend the functionalities of Microsoft Excel and help them save their time and efforts.

Microsoft Excel is one of the most widely used applications worldwide for data storage and analysis. Therefore, mastering Excel is an essential skill and can help you save a tremendous amount of time working with lengthy sheets.

And if you want to make the most of Excel, there are lots of additional functionalities available that can further help you become productive and ease your life.

Excel add-ins are those additional tools designed for different purposes that we will cover in this article.

Let’s find out more about Excel add-ins and how they can help you.

What are Excel Add-ins?

Excel add-ins work like applications that you download or buy for your mobile phone or computer. These are mini software tools you can install into Microsoft Excel and add many functionalities such as shortcuts, tasks, and time-saving options that you cannot find in a standalone Excel app.

Third parties create Excel add-ins to provide Excel users wide-ranging capabilities and save their time and efforts. Developing these add-ins requires coding expertise in languages such as XML and VBA and providing a simple-to-use interface that complements Excel.

Where can you find Excel add-ins?

There are 2000 Excel add-ins in the market, and they can work on certain versions of Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Finding Excel add-ins is easy with a few steps:

• Open any document or create a new one in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint
• On Windows, you will find the “insert” tab in the opened document. Just click on it and choose “My Add-ins” to see the list of all the add-ins available.
• Open the add-ins window and click on the “Store.” Now, you can find add-ins and install the one you want by clicking on “Add.”

The process for finding Excel add-ins is the same for mac but slightly different for Outlook. If you want to install an add-in in Outlook on your desktop, choose the “Store” icon that you can find in “Home.” Next, you can search for add-ins and install them, similar to what we did for Windows.

How to use or delete an Excel Add-in?

How to use: Once you install an Excel add-in of your choice, you need to locate it inside the Excel spreadsheet. You can find it on the ribbon menu in Windows or macOS, but it appears as a button that you can find at the top of emails you have received.

If you still cannot find it, revisit the Excel add-ins window and select your preferred add-in. Click “Add.” This will launch the Excel add-in in your task panel inside the Excel application.

How to delete: If you want to delete an Excel add-in you have installed, there’s no provision to do that. But you can disable or hide them. For this, open the Excel Add-ins window and look for “Manage My Add-ins,” and click on it. Next, go to “My Account” from the dropdown to click on “Hide.” This will hide the add-in you don’t want to use anymore.

Let’s now look at some of the most useful Excel add-ins for you.

Power Pivot

Try Power Pivot – an Excel add-in you can use to create data models and perform data analysis. Power Pivot helps you perform info analysis faster, share insights, and gather large volumes of data from different sources.

Excel has a simple data model in its workbook, but in Power Pivot, you will find a more sophisticated data model. Any data you import in Excel is also available in Power Pivot, and the reverse is also true. You can also build PivotCharts and PivotTables to analyze the data to make business decisions on time efficiently.

Power Pivot allows you to create calculated columns, relationships between heterogeneous data and measures data using formulae. In addition, you will find fast processing when it comes to analysis and calculations. Its dashboard is also helpful to manage and monitor shared applications to be sure about security, performance, and high availability.

The tool uses DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), a formula language that is useful in extending the data manipulation capabilities of Excel. In Power Pivot, you can rename columns, tables, and filter data during import.

Moreover, create KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to use in Power View and PivotTables reports. Share your workbooks easily with others, just like you share files. Get more benefits by publishing the workbook to a SharePoint environment to allow others to analyze the data.

Power Query

Microsoft introduces an Excel add-in, Power Query, that intensifies the self-service business intelligence experience by simplifying access, collaboration, and data discovery. It provides a better experience for data transformation, data discovery, and enrichment for information BI professionals, Information Workers, and other Excel users.

Identify the data from your work sources such as Excel, XML and text files, web pages, OData feeds, Hadoop HDFS, relational databases, etc. Use the search option to discover essential data from outside and inside your organization within Excel.

Disparate data sources, shape them, and combine data from multiple sources to prepare it for next step analysis in tools like Power Pivot and Excel and visualization tools like Power Map and Power View. With the help of Power BI, you can share the queries you have or created within your organization so that users can easily search them.

Power Query supports operating systems such as Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. Besides, it supports office versions like Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus with software assurance and Microsoft Office 2013. Power Query also requires Internet Explorer 9 or above and is available for 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

Power Query offers capabilities like Active Directory, Azure-based data sources, Dynamics CRM, Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, Exchange, Teradata, Salesforce, BusinessObjects, SharePoint Lists, Power BI Data Catalog, and many more.

Multi-purpose Excel Modelling Tool

Free Multi-purpose Excel Modelling Tool contains many tools for formatting, excel modeling, and navigation. All the tools are ready-to-use and straightforward, while the Navigate tool allows finding a sheet in the active workbook.

Put each sheet in the upper left-hand corner to navigate it easily. The tool lets you convert every cell reference in the range to relative, absolute, row absolute, or column absolute references. You can also go for copying a single sheet multiple times simultaneously.

Create a new sheet to list the comments in the active workbook. You can insert a single checkbox and one option button in every cell in a selected range along with the value contained inside the cell.

Hide the sheets which are only visible in VBA or copy every value in sheets in a hard-coded workbook. Here, you will find options like formatting, cleaning, analyzing different errors, etc. Show creation date, last saved date, and author of the active workbook. The tool shows the path of the file containing the active workbook.

Analysis ToolPak

Develop complex engineering or statistical analyses by saving time and steps via Analysis ToolPak. It helps you provide appropriate parameters and data for every tool analysis and use engineering or statistical macro functions to display and calculate the results in the form of a table.

Some tools also generate charts along with output tables, and data analysis functions will work only for a single worksheet at a time. So, if you are performing data analysis on a group of worksheets, you will receive the result of the first worksheet, and the remaining will be blank.

Load the Analysis ToolPak add-in program from the add-ins category. It includes several tools to perform the analysis:

• ANOVA: This analysis tool provides multiple types of analysis. It has a Single Factor Analysis tool and a Two-Factor Analysis tool with replication and without replication.
• Correlation: The CORREL and PEARSON functions calculate the correlation coefficient between the two variables taken from the ‘N’ number of objects.
• Covariance: It is similar to Correlation. It is used when ‘n’ number of objects are there.
• Descriptive Statistics: It generates the report providing information regarding the variability of the data and central tendency.

The other similar tools are Exponential smoothing, F-test two samples for variances, Fourier analysis, histogram, moving average, random number generation, rank and percentile, regression, sampling, t-test, and z-test.

ASAP Utilities

ASAP Utilities is a robust Excel add-in with tools to add more functionalities to Excel. Developed in 1999, it is one of the most popular Excel add-ins globally and can help you accelerate your work and save time.

ASAP or As Soon As Possible Utilities is called so because it can reduce time-intensive work significantly with useful utilities or macro tools. Its time-savings additions and features for Excel result from years of rigorous development combined with user feedback.

They constantly update the tools to provide users with optimum experience and have maintained the interface user-friendly. At present, around 750k people have used ASAP Utilities in 170 countries, including 23k organizations.

There’s a free version available – Home & Student – for schoolwork, home projects, and non-profit organizations.

Money in Excel

Connect financial accounts seamlessly to Excel and view and manage your finances in a single place with Money in Excel add-in. It will help you learn how you spend money and generate personalized insights such as monthly expenditure, bank fees, subscription prices, etc.

By looking at this data, you can optimize your expenses and reach your financial goals faster. This add-in is available for all Microsoft 365 users and personal subscribers from the US. It’s possible to customize this tool to make it more suitable for your usage.

Money in Excel also provides tailored charts to view data with clarity or build charts on your own with cool features. You can import your account credentials and transaction data to Money in Excel and synchronize them easily. It also gives you personalized tips on managing your finances all inside Excel.

Accounting Collection

Accounting Collection is a complete suite of accounting-related add-ins for Excel. There are 17 add-ins included to serve various purposes and make Excel easy to work with. They are:

• Cell Color Assistant: It helps you create a toolbar with buttons to format rows and cells easily.
• Checkbook Assistant: Manage your bank statement easily with this tool in Excel
• Compare Lists Assistant: Use it to compare lists and differentiate them in Excel.
• Comments Assistant: Manage comments easily and modify them with this tool.
• Conditional Format Assistant: It’s for formatting cells easily based on various tests.
• Favorite Bookmarks: It helps you to bookmark folders and files to enable quick access.
• List Searcher: Use it to search lists for matching phrases or keywords
• Password assistant: Lock or unlock worksheets easily with it.
• Quick Notes Assistant: It is useful for taking notes
• Randomizer: Create several random copies of the lists using this tool.
• Random Sampler: It is used to select random samples of your Excel data.
• Random Number Generator: It generates random numbers easily.
• Row Assistant: Hide/show rows according to search criteria.
• Report Runner: Print Excel reports automatically using this.
• Row to Column Viewer: It helps you view all data simultaneously in a row.
• Sheet Navigator: Use it to move from one sheet to another and view all the sheets with a single click.
• Workbook Print Assistant: It helps you print worksheets from different workbooks at a time.

The best thing is all these add-ins come with step-by-step instructions and exercise files to make it easy to learn how to use Accounting Collections. Using them, you can acquire hands-on practice on all the features.

Accounting Collection is available at a one-time purchase of US$89.95.

Lucidchart

Communicate complex tasks and processes visually in Excel using process maps, diagrams, and flowcharts with Lucidchart to share your unique ideas with others. The tool is effortless to install in Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Just visit the Microsoft Store and insert Lucidchart by searching it in the list of add-ins available. Next, install Lucidchart and start creating diagrams. It comes with a straightforward user interface with drag-and-drop functionality, which has almost a flat learning curve. They also provide lots of examples and templates to create flowcharts.

Complete your work without hassles or stress; start importing and exporting files to eliminate repetitive tasks. Lucidchart integrates with G-Suite, YouTube, Facebook, Dropbox, and more. You can also publish your flowcharts as images or PDFs and easily include them in presentations and reports or embed them directly on a web page.

Supermetrics

Move marketing data easily into Excel using this useful add-in – Supermetrics, instead of the tedious process of copying and pasting. Using this will help you eradicate inaccuracies due to human errors in your data.

Supermetrics is a quick and straightforward way to import data into Excel by connecting it with your marketing tools. To get started, choose the dimension and metrics you want to pull from your marketing tools and let Supermetrics move it directly into the selected cells.

While moving the data, Supermetrics ensures that no changes are made to your data. All the data you move will be the same with the highest level of accuracy, so you can start using it quickly. Supermetrics integrates with popular advertising and marketing platforms such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram Insights, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Ads, HubSpot, YouTube, Mailchimp, etc.

Supermetrics enables you to schedule refreshes to update data automatically in your Excel every month, week, day, or hour. In addition, you can receive custom alerts or full reports in your inbox. It saves you from tracking all the activities without updating reports manually.

They never store user data; they move them into Excel. They are CCPA and GDPR compliant and have 500k users across the globe, including brands like Dyson, BBC, and Nestle.

Hoadley Finance Add-in

Hoadley Trading and Investment Tools consists of a suite of modular software tools based on Excel to construct investment portfolios and their analysis. This toolset is useful for portfolio investors and asset managers.

It includes The Hoadley Finance Add-in with comprehensive portfolio analytics tools. It comprises analytics tools for:

• Investment performance
• Asset allocation with the help of Black-Litterman
• Risk management
• Portfolio optimization
• Correlation, volatility, and covariance calculation

The Finance Add-in also has functions for analyzing options and various other derivatives. You can call these functions from VBA macros/modules or spreadsheet cells.

Financial Edge NXT Budget Creator

Create budgets using Financial Edge NEXT through Excel. It aims to help users spend more time on productive tasks important for their mission instead of creating new budgets manually.

This tool can accelerate the process of adding new budgets and helps you easily enter details like accounts, grants, scenarios, and projects in Excel. After submitting them in Financial Edge NXT, you can customize the values and fields and open the new budgets.

Ablebits Ultimate Suite

Use Ablebits to speed up your work. It comes with over 70 professional tools, 300 options, and different use cases to help you complete your task flawlessly in Excel. It is a perfect suite with time-savings tools designed as a result of 18 years of rigorous development.

The tool lets you fill blanks easily with values from upwards, downwards, or adjacent cells. You can also fill the cells with real numbers, random integers, dates, strings, and Booleans or shuffle rows and columns, resort cells, and randomize cells in columns and rows.

Maintain high data accuracy with options to identify and fix typos, broken links, similar entries, and fuzzy matches. You can search, replace items simultaneously and filter lists by values. The tools also help you manage your tables, comments, workbooks, and watermarks.

The Ultimate Suite makes it easy to join cells and consolidate several workbooks and detect duplicate entries. In addition, you can compare different sheets to find duplicates, reshape worksheets by transposing, converting, unpivoting, flipping, and swapping your ranges, and adjusting layouts.

It has a 14-day free trial version for Excel 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, and Office 365 and is priced at $69.

Conclusion 👩‍🏫

Excel add-ins are developed to solve business-specific problems using a simple spreadsheet as a base. This will allow you to share your data easily and reduce the need to install multiple apps for different uses. All you need is Microsoft Office. Save your time and efforts using the Excel add-ins we have discussed above.