Tired of trying to find Excel features hidden among the options pages
and dialog boxes? Putting all those options up front is just one of
the many benefits of Ultimate Add-in, a collection of over 80 utilities
and 20 custom functions (nearly 7000 lines of code) is available. The utility adds lots of smart shortcuts, from swapping cells and ranges to manipulating sheets and formulas.
Among the user-interface changes available: You can show and hide
the formula bar, status bar, gridlines, and horizontal or vertical
scroll bars, plus quickly enable AutoFilter, check worksheet protection
settings, reveal hidden sheets or cells, or find unlocked cells.
UAI adds a host of features for working with individual cells or
ranges. You can select cells by content (all equal to 100, for example)
or format property (font name, font color, bold or italic, among
others), find those with errors, find (and remove) cells with links, or
reverse the signs in all numeric cells (turn positive values to
negatives, and vice versa). Text manipulation includes removing spaces
(leading, trailing, excess, or all) or characters (leading, trailing,
all alpha, or all numeric).
You can create ranges or change their dimensions and location.
For quickly switching between relative and absolute addressing, UAI has
an option to switch between the two methods for selected cells, or to
change formulas to relative rows and absolute columns or to relative
columns and absolute rows. One of our favorites: converting a long
column into several columns (you tell the program how many elements in
each column and the new starting location; it does the rest).
Working with more than one sheet is also easier. Imagine sorting
sheets by name or a custom order you define, add serial sheets (Mon,
Tues, Wed ... or Jan, Feb, Mar ...). You can also insert sheets using a
custom naming convention; you specify the leading text, starting
number, and increment, plus how many sheets you want; UAI then creates
sheets, such as “Region 2, Region 4, Region 6, and so on. If you’d
prefer, UAI can create sheets using values already entered in a cell
range. Pretty slick.
You can insert the current date in a variety of formats, find and
delete conditional formats or data validation, use the full file path
or the contents of a cell as the header or footer when printing a
worksheet, or reset what Excel thinks is the last cell in a worksheet.
A Range Info toolbar is a handy feature, which includes the
ability to select a range and with a single click view the average,
numeric count, minimum, maximum, total cell count, and sum of values in
that range. Select a new range, click on the numeric-keypad icon, and
UAI recalculates the values.
Among the custom functions are some to show the full path of the
current file, the ability to insert text into other text (you supply the
starting position as well), and calculating the sum of the user-defined
top values in a range.
