AUGUST 2018
6
Productive Microsoft Excel add-ins
By Arnold Villeneuve
There are many Microsoft Excel add-ins available for free
that can make you more productive. This article will show
you how to find and install them on your local copy of
Microsoft Excel. You can also install them in you Office365
copy of Excel as well.
What is an Excel add-in?
An Excel add-in allows you to extend Excel application
functionality across multiple platforms including Office
for Windows, Office Online, Office for the Mac, and Of-
fice for the iPad. Use Excel add-ins within a workbook to:
• interact with Excel objects, read and write Excel data
• extend functionality using web-based task pane or
content pane
• add custom ribbon buttons or contextual menu items
• provide richer interaction using dialog window
You can find Excel add-ins by clicking on the Insert
Tab and selecting the Store icon. Then click on Store Tab
within the Apps for Office pop-up window. This will
show you all of the Excel add-ins.
There are many categories of Excel
add-ins to choose from. Take a moment
to browse some of the many categories.
Maybe search for something you are
interested in or a function you have been
needing to do: a task like create inter
-
active charts. You can either type in a
search word in the search dialog box or
simply click on one of the categories.
Excel add-in categories
For the purpose of this article we are go-
ing to install the Microsoft Azure AI Ma-
chine Learning add-in and then perform
sentiment analysis on some tweets. Don't worry, it's not
as scary as it sounds. In the search dialog box search for
"machine." You should see the following screen.
Twitter Text Sentiment Analysis
The Azure Machine Learning add-in will install and
give you two options. Please select the Text Sentiment
Analysis.
Now, let's download some sample Tweet text data. You
can download it from this link and simply copy and paste
it into your existing black workbook sheet. Once you
paste in the Tweet data you can start the Text Sentiment
Analysis solution by selecting the data range, specifying
where you want the output to start (B1 in our example),
select Auto Predict, and clicking on the Predict button.
Now, Excel will send your data range out to the Azure
AI Machine Learning application for text sentiment
analysis processing and return the results to you starting
in the Output cell you specified. Here is what our results
look like.
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