Friday, February 11th, 2011

Excel 2007 & 2010 – Hidden add-ins

Excel 2007 2010 analysis toolpak lookup wizard solver add-in

Excel 2007 & 2010 come with a number of add-ins that you can get to by choosing the Options button (File in Excel 2010) and choose Excel Options (Options in Excel 2010) and click Add-ins. From the Manage dropdown list choose Excel Add-ins and click Go.

Image explaining how to install the Excel 2007 2010 analysis toolpak lookup wizard solver add-in

A list of available Add-ins appears in the list. Any that don’t have their checkboxes checked aren’t enabled right now.

One you might want to enable is the Analysis Toolpak – this gives you access to functions like RANDBETWEEN and NETWORKDAYS. There’s also possibly a Lookup Wizard (in Excel 2007 only – it was discontinued in Excel 2010) and a Solver add-in in the list.

Click on any of the Add-ins to add them to Excel. Once you do, they’ll be available every time you launch Excel.

RANDBETWEEN is a handy function for filling cells with a random value. It’s syntax is RANDBETWEEN(startvalue, endvalue) so to fill a range with values between 100 and 200 use =RANDBETWEEN(100,200) then copy it to the range to fill. You can read more about the function here: Random numbers in Excel.

NETWORKDAYS  will calculate the number of working days between two dates. You can read more about this function here: Excel – calculating workdays with Networkdays.

Helen Bradley

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Random numbers in Excel

When you’re testing a workbook it is handy to be able to fill a set of cells with a sample value. The Randbetween function included in the Analysis Tookpak does this for you.

To enable this, choose Tools, Add-Ins and enable the checkbox for the Analysis Toolpak. Now write the function, for example, this provides a random number between 1 and 100 (including both numbers):

=randbetween(1,100)

Copy it to all the cells to fill. To fix the values so they don’t change each time something in the worksheet changes, select the cells with the formula, choose Edit, Copy then Edit, Paste Special, Values.

Helen Bradley