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Excel has always stood out for data analysts as the best tool with innumerable formulas and functions. At the same time, Excel serves essential functions like making tables, charts, and reports. It also helps clean, sort, and analyze data.
Here are five free Excel add-ins that make data analysis a more fun and easy task.
Power Pivot
A power pivot is a free Excel add-in used to perform data analysis in Excel. Power pivot can process large data sets from spreadsheets, text files, cloud services, or any other source within seconds. One can not enable it by default in Excel. You need to add it to the ribbon by going to the office options.
Analysis toolpak
The analysis toolpak is another helpful tool in Excel. It provides tools for working on statistical and engineering problems. Just provide data and parameters for analysis; the tool analysis will display the result. It often creates charts and graphs in many cases. One can not enable it by default in Excel. You need to add it to the ribbon by going to the office options.
Solver
Excel Solver is a What-If analysis tool. It is a tool used to determine how the desired result can be achieved by making some changes in the assumption of a model. It is useful when determining the best outcome, given some assumptions. The Solver can determine the most efficient travel routes, maximize sales/profits, etc.
Random Generator
The random generator add-in in Excel is used to fill desired cells with random numbers, dates, and values. This add-in is mainly used to create dummy data. All you need to do is set up the Add-in, select the cells you want to populate with random data, and you are done. You can use this data as mock data to practice various formulas and functions of Excel.
Fuzzy Lookup
The fuzzy lookup Excel add-in was developed to match contextual data in Excel. It can identify similar fuzzy rows between two tables or duplicate fuzzy rows within a table. It has vigorous matching to a wide variety of errors. The errors include abbreviations, spelling errors, and data editing (added or missing words).
Excel is a most widely used spreadsheet tool among data analysts. While Excel's functions can not be ignored, the free add-ins that Excel spreadsheets have is more like a cherry on top. Try using these five Excel add-ins in your data analysis, and let us know which one you like the most in the comment section.
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