By Joey Hodges, MBA
AcceleratingCFO Consultant
AcceleratingCFO is excited about our new series of Excel tips and tricks. Most of you, when you think about it, spend more time using Excel than you spend using your Accounting software. We could not do our jobs without Excel. From simple tables to complex models, finance people live in Excel. We thought our readers would enjoy learning some of our tricks and techniques — and encourage you to share yours. Let’s make this an interactive series.
In this first article, we’re excited to share an incredibly powerful add-in for Excel: Ablebits (https://www.ablebits.com/), with versions for both Excel and Google sheets compatible with Windows, Mac OS and Cromebooks. It is a quick plugin that allows you to do some amazing things. Ablebits has a powerful Outlook tool that makes sending bulk emails incredibly easy. Additionally, Ablebits offers generous full function free trials of all of their products and, in my experience, is a great value once the free trial period is over. I’ve been using Ablebits for over a decade and am constantly impressed by what it can do.
Ablebits Ultimate Suite version has 70+ tools to boost your productivity. For example, it performs multiple text manipulation functions in a mere minute and works as a replacement for vlookup to move data from one worksheet to another. Ablebits probably saves me over 20 hours a month.
Here’s a list of some of the tools I use most often:
| Merge sheets | Merge duplicates | Compare sheets | Vlookup wizard |
| Trim spaces | Extract text | Split text | Merge text |
| Date & Time | Text to date | Delete blanks | Fuzzy duplicates |
| Find & Replace | Sum by Color | Find broken links | Filter |
You might be thinking: What’s the big deal? I already know how to do all this. I agree (well, I know how to do MOST of them) but Ablebits allows you to do these tasks incredibly fast….and as we know, time is money.
Check out Ablebits. We think you will become a believer.
