5 Microsoft Excel Add-Ons to Boost Your Productivity

Microsoft Excel is considered one of the most useful tools in the workplace. Excel gurus use keyboard shortcuts as if they were playing a piano, and can make Excel do some really wild things using advanced formulas and VBA scripting. However, if Excel is used incorrectly, it can seriously take your productivity levels down. If you are comfortable with your knowledge of how to build formulas, the only other variable you can control is speed. Here are the top 5 Microsoft Excel add-ons (both hardware and software) that can increase your speed and thus productivity in Excel:

1)  KeyCuts Silicone Keyboard Covers

These keyboard covers take learning Excel keyboard shortcuts to the next level. They guide you through the top 20 most commonly used shortcuts for data manipulation and formatting. One of the best parts about these keyboard covers is that they are made of thin flexible silicone, and slip on and off your Macbook keyboard with ease. The covers come in a variety of colors to add individuality to your Macbook. Spill crumbs or get dust on your keyboard often? These covers protect your keys from everyday use!

the-key-cuts

2)  Excel Utilities

Not to be confused with ASAP Utilities, this handy add-on is meant for the power Excel user who is used to doing advanced operations but wants some extra keyboard shortcuts and buttons to quickly do advanced operations. Features include unhiding all sheets, unprotecting all sheets, and keyboard shortcuts for conditional formatting operations.

3)  4Keyboard Excel Stickers

These are simple stickers you stick onto your keyboard that show what the Excel keyboard operation is for a given key on your keyboard. For instance, the letter V has the word “Paste” on it letting you know that hitting CONTROL plus V lets you do a paste operation.

Excel-keyboard-stickets

4)  Analysis ToolPak

This is an add-in developed by Microsoft that’s been around for a long long time. The add-in lets you do complex data analysis relating to statistics and engineering. Common statistical operations like finding regression, correlation, and sampling are reduced to seconds by utilizing this add-in with your data.

5)  ASAP Utilities for Excel

Dubbed as “The most popular add-in for Excel users,” this add-in helps you shave minutes and hours from repetitive data manipulation tasks. Tasks that usually require formula writing are solved with the simple click of a button. Quickly remove leading, trailing, and excessive spaces from data that you have imported that contains tons of spaces. Quickly create a bunch of worksheets with auto-naming. Select cells based on content and formatting. ASAP Utilities truly gets all the dirty work done for you!

Let us know what you think of these add-ons! Do they boost your productivity?

(This post originally appeared on the Excel With Business blog)