Did you know Excel for Office 365 has
several add-ins? I've searched through thousands of them to bring you the top
10 free add-ins available from the Microsoft Store. To install add-ins in
Excel for Office 365 just go to the Insert tab and click on Get Add-ins. This
brings up the Microsoft Store where you can select from several different apps.
Click on My Add-ins to see the list of add-ins you've already installed. Let's
get started with the top 10 free add-ins. #1 Excel Colorizer. Excel
Colorizer allows you to easily add color patterns to your spreadsheet data. Start
by highlighting an area of your spreadsheet you want to colorize. Choose from four types of color styles. For Uniform, select a color from the palette
and click Colorize. It applies the color to your highlighted data. You can also
apply a pattern - Interlaced or Waves and adjust the other settings accordingly.
For the Vertical type choose a start and end color and it applies the color
gradient across the highlighted area vertically. And as expected, Horizontal
applies the color gradient in a horizontal direction. Matrix combines both Vertical and Horizontal gradient. One thing worth
noting is that there is no remove color option. To do that go to the Home tab and choose Clear Formats from this pull-down menu. If you want to spice up your Excel
spreadsheet use Excel Colorizer. It's easy to use and it's free. #2 - QR4Office. I recommended QR4Office for PowerPoint but it also works great in Excel. It's the easiest way to
add a QR code to your spreadsheet. Once installed simply enter a URL, select your
color and size, and insert it into your spreadsheet. Now you can move and resize the image as needed. When you scan the QR code from a mobile device it directs you
to the URL. QR4Office lets you select from multiple types of QR codes
including URLs, mail addresses, phone numbers, text messages, geo locations, or customize your own. If you need a QR code in your spreadsheet use QR4Office. #3 - Mini Calendar. Mini Calendar
and Date Picker allows you to embed a calendar into your spreadsheet for
reference and for quickly entering dates. Once installed it adds a calendar to
your spreadsheet which you can position anywhere. Select a cell and then select
a date on the calendar to insert it into your spreadsheet. You can also
insert the current time. Click on this icon to highlight a range of dates, hit
OK, and it displays those dates in bold on your calendar. Click on the menu in
the upper right and you can Show as a Saved Image. There are several other settings to
adjust the size, theme, calendar system, show week numbers, and to hide the
settings. Mini Calendar and Date Picker is a great tool to make date management
easier in Excel. #4 - Places. Places is a quick
reference guide showing public location data from Foursquare. After installing
just select a location in your spreadsheet and it displays local
information nearby. You can use cities, states, countries, or other places of
interest. Click on any of the locations listed and it connects directly to
Foursquare with more details. Places will show public data even if you don't have
a Foursquare account so give it a try. #5 - People Graph. People Graph is
a Microsoft add-in to show a table of data visually. It opens with sample data.
Click in the upper-right corner to bring up the menu where you can change the
title and select data from your spreadsheet. It is designed for only two
columns of data and ignores the headings so just select the core data you want to
graph. Now you can select settings from the menu to pick from three different
types of graphs, eight different themes, and sixteen different shapes for your
graph. It links to your data source and any changes are reflected in the graph
but you can convert it to an image from the menu. People Graph is simplistic but
it creates a visually pleasing representation of your data that
normally would take several more steps in Excel. Check it out. #6 - Activity Timer. Activity Timer measures the time you
take for activities in Excel and lets you place the recorded data into your
spreadsheet. Once installed it shows up on the Home tab. When you're ready to
time your activities open it and add your first activity. Give it a name and
click Start to begin working on that activity. You can Pause and continue the
timer as you're working and when you're done with that activity click Stop. Add a
second activity and use Start, Pause, and Stop again as needed. You may find that
you need to return to a previous activity and continue. Just click the + on that line. This records a separate measurement of
time for that activity and shows a running average across the multiple
recordings. At any point you can paste the results of your activity
measurements to excel. This shows the times of each recording. As a helpful
suggestion highlight the data, click on the Quick Analysis Tool in the corner,
select Totals, and this Sum if you want to see all the totals. Activity Timer is
a simple but useful tool if you need to measure the time you spend on activities
in Excel. #7 - Bing Maps. Bing Maps is another
add-in from Microsoft that lets you plot location data and values from a table in
Excel to a map. When added to your spreadsheet it brings up a blank map. You can select the sample data if needed, otherwise just highlight your data table
including the headings and click the Show Locations icon. It instantly plots
your data points on the map at the locations you specified. The circles are
proportionate in size to the data values from your table. Click the Settings icon
to change the map view or pin colors. If you have multiple data points you can
also choose a pie chart for display. As with other add-ins, you can show the
map as a saved image. Bing Maps is a slick add-in to represent your data as a
map and it's completely free. #8 - Remove Unwanted Characters. Remove Unwanted Characters is a helpful add-in if you work with text in Excel and need
to clean it of non-printable characters, symbols, punctuation, or other unnecessary characters. Once it's installed you just highlight a range of text and choose the
option from the menu that you want to clean. Hit Yes and it cleans out those
numeric characters. You can remove text characters and you can remove symbols
and punctuation marks. You also have the option of removing a custom character.
It's designed to clean up the most common annoyances with data, especially when you import text from an external source. Just be aware that you don't want to use it on formulas. It will convert them to text making them non-functional.
Remove Uwanted Characters can be useful for large volumes of messy text. #9 - Range Calculations. Range Calculation applies basic math
operations to a range of values in your spreadsheet. Once installed just
highlight a range of numbers and choose the math operation you want to apply to
them from the menu. Let's say we want to add 20 to all these numbers. Calculate it
and it instantly updates the entire range. How about multiplying by 3. You can also apply a percentage or add
and subtract percentages from the values. Range Calculations is really basic but
it's quicker than creating formulas and then copying and pasting the results to
a new location in your spreadsheet so it can save you some time, especially for
large sets of data. #10 Power Pivot. Power Pivot is an add-in you can use to
perform powerful data analysis and create sophisticated data models in
Excel. Since Power Pivot has been around for a while, it's not installed through
the Microsoft Store interface like other add-ins mentioned in this video. Instead
go to File/Options/Add-ins and come down here to the bottom and choose COM Add-ins and hit Go. Check this box for Microsoft Power Pivot for Excel and hit
OK. This adds Power Pivot to your menu.
Power Pivot lets you manage large data sets from multiple sources such as SQL, Oracle, CSV files, websites, or data already in Excel. Excel is normally
limited to about 1 million rows but Power Pivot is virtually unlimited. I've
imported some data here as a sample to give you an idea of what Power Pivot
features look like. When you bring up the Power Pivot menu there's a Manage option which brings in the data that you have on your spreadsheet. If that's missing
just click Add to Data Model and that will bring the data in. You can also get
data from external sources. Once you've combined all this data you
can now create different things like pivot tables or pivot charts so if I want
to do a pivot table just click this, go to a new sheet, and now just like a
normal Excel pivot table I can pull data into this pivot table and see a summary
of my data. Let's come back over here, go to Manage. Let's pick Pivot Chart this time. We'll create a new sheet. You have the same
features available and it creates a chart. One of the benefits of Power Pivot
is its ability to create relationships between your data elements. I won't go
into detail but when you look at the Diagram View you can add relationships
to these tables. This allows you to create very complex data analytics in
both Pivot tables and Pivot charts. Power Pivot is a very powerful add-in
that you can use on large sets of data imported from multiple location and
that's why I wanted to share it as one of the free add-ins for excel. Thanks for
watching this video on the top ten Excel free add-ins. I have several other Excel
videos available at youtube.com/seletraining, including tips and tricks for Excel and many other Office 365 applications. Take a look. Hey, if you want to see more videos like this one please subscribe
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