John Walkenbach’s PUP Add-In For Excel

[Update – John Walkenbach has sold his website and this product is no longer available]

About a week ago, John Walkenbach had a clearance sale for his PUP Add-In for Excel. PUP stands for Power Utility Pak, and that’s not an overstatement.

I’ve been using the latest version, PUPv7 for Excel 2007, for the past week, and am amazed by all its features.

When installed, PUPv7 adds a tab to the Excel Ribbon, with six groups of commands. The Ribbon tab’s groups don’t collapse if you make the Excel window narrower, like the built-in tabs do, but that’s a minor quibble.

There are too many features to list, but here are some of my favourites, so far.

PUP Bookmarks

Create a bookmark to mark a range in any Excel file, and you can quickly return to that file and location from the PUP Ribbon tab.

Create Workbook Contents Sheet

There’s a list of workbook tools, including the handy Create Workbook Contents Sheet command. This creates a cover sheet in your workbook, with a set of hyperlinks or buttons that link to the other sheets in the workbook.

Maybe the next version will add a hyperlink back to the contents sheet on each indexed sheet, in a specified cell.

Customize a New Workbook

With the Customize a New Workbook command you can quickly create a workbook with a sheet for each month, each weekday, a numbered series or a list of items.

Text Tools

In the Modify Cells and Ranges drop down is a Text Tools command. With it, you can change the case of text in selected cells, add text within existing text, or remove text or spaces.

With this tool you won’t have to create formulas or macros when you want to modify text, just fill in boxes and click Apply.

Many More Features

Those are just a few of the features in PUPv7.

There are also worksheet functions, randomizer tools, workbook reports and many more features.

I highly recommend that you download the free trial (30 days) or purchase a copy ($40 US).

PUPv7 is a real time saver as as you work in Excel 2007, and it should pay for itself very quickly. PUPv6 is available for Excel 2003 or earlier versions.

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