- Third-Party Excel Utilities
- Pitfalls of Using Excel Tools
- Where to Find Excel Resources
- Customizing Third-Party Resources
- Make or Buy?
Where to Find Excel Resources
With all the Excel resources out there, the biggest job is finding the ones you need. Freeware and shareware sites such as Freeware Home are a great source of Excel resources. In addition, a number of sites have lists of Excel resources, often grouped by category or interest. One example is Excel Business Tools, which has a number of finance-oriented Excel templates, as well as a solutions directory of Excel templates, applications, and other resources.
Several dozen free finance-related Excel templates are available from Matt Evans. Paul A. Jensen, at the University of Texas, has a number of Excel add-ins for operations management and industrial engineering, including Markowitz Portfolio Analysis for evaluating equity investments and process-flow analysis for manufacturing.
Of course, one of the main sources of Excel resources is Microsoft, which maintains extensive collections of add-ins, templates, custom functions, and worksheets on its Excel web site, most of which are free for downloading.
In many cases, the best course is to rely on your favorite search engine. Just keep in mind that what you’re looking for may be identified in multiple ways:
- Spreadsheet
- Worksheet
- Workbook
- Custom function
- Add-in
- Application
For this reason, it’s usually not a good idea to include terms such as spreadsheet in your search, but to use Excel and the name of the task (business plan, for instance) as the keywords.