Supercharge Excel With ASAP Utilities

30.12.2010

Excel add-in piles so many features onto Excel, it can make you dizzy. You can convert text to uppercase, lowercase, or proper case (first word capitalized), merge and import multiple files, and copy a selection to the clipboard as HTML. Jobs that you could already do get grouped logically into one place. For instance, the Vision Control dialog box lets you hide and unhide gridlines, page breaks, tabs, and scroll bars. You can easily reverse the order of selected cells, fill a range with random numbers, and change hyperlinks to hyperlink() formulas.

The ASAP selection tools alone are enough to turn any Excel power user into an ASAP Utilities addict. You can select the cell with the smallest or largest number, select all cells containing an error, inverse the selection, and select the same block of cells on every page in the file.

This Excel add-in puts all of these options, and many more, on a new Excel ribbon. This pull-down menu-filled ribbon is a bit crowded, but you can make your favorite tools more accessible. The first item on that ribbon is a configurable pull-down menu called "My favorite tools."

And should your number crunching get too frustrating, you can relieve the tension with the Funny (error) messages tool, which simply displays make-believe, whimsical error messages. I just got "Runtime Error 60 at 417A:32CF: Incompetent User."

Note: This software is free for personal use only. Business users must pay $49 at the end of a 90-day trial period.