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15 Convenient Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Add-ins

Last week I featured add-ons for G Suite for Education users. This week it’s time to feature add-ins for the Microsoft crowd. Those of you who aren’t regular Microsoft users should take a look too because you might be surprised by what’s available now.

You can get add-ins for PowerPoint, Word, and Excel from the “insert” menu in all three of those tools. In this video I demonstrate the process in PowerPoint. The process is essentially the same in Word and Excel.

Word

Pexels is a popular website for finding high-quality images that are in the public domain. The Pexels add-in for Word lets you search for and insert high-quality images into your documents for free.

Immersive Reader is a part of free Microsoft’s Learning Tools. Students can use Immersive Reader in Word to have documents read aloud to them. The words and syllables on the page are highlighted as they are read aloud. You can watch my short video overview of Immersive Reader in Word here.

EasyBib for Word makes it easy to search for books, websites, and periodicals without leaving your document. Once you have found the reference material that you need to cite, it can be be added to your document’s bibliography with just one click.

Want to give your document a “fun” look? Try using the Emoji Keyboard add-in for Word.

Kaizena is a free service that can be used to add voice comments to Word documents and to PDFs. To do this you need to create a free account on the Kaizena website and use the Kaizena web app to create a “group” or list of students or other collaborators. Once you have done that you can create a conversation based around an uploaded Word document or PDF. In this video I demonstrate how to add voice comments to a PDF.

PowerPoint

Mentimeter is an audience response tool lets you create polls and quizzes for your audience to respond to during your presentations. Responses to open-ended poll questions can be displayed as a word cloud. Mentimeter offers a PowerPoint add-in to display your polls and quizzes from your slideshow. Your audience members can respond from their phones, tablets, or laptops.

PhET is a free resource that has been popular with science and math teachers for many years. PhET provides free interactive math and science simulations covering topics in physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and mathematics. 56 of the PhET simulations are available to insert into PowerPoint presentations through the use of PhET’s free PowerPoint Add-in. With the Add-in installed you can browse the available simulations and insert them into your slides. The simulations work in your slide just as they do on the PhET website.

The GeoGebra PowerPoint Add-in lets you access GeoGebra materials directly from your PowerPoint slides. You can also use the Add-in to create graphs, shapes, and spreadsheets within your slides. The GeoGebra PowerPoint Add-in works in the desktop and online versions of PowerPoint.

For years Pixabay has been one of my-go places to find high-quality images that are in the public domain. The Pixabay add-in for PowerPoint makes it easy to find great images to use in your presentations without ever having to leave the presentation while you are working on it.  

Khan Academy’s math videos and math practice exercises are available in a PowerPoint Add-in. The Khan Academy PowerPoint Add-in lets you find videos and exercises to insert directly into slides. The exercises that you insert into your slides are fully functional which means that you could use them for live demonstrations without having to leave your slides.

Excel

Just like Google Sheets users can insert Google Maps, Excel users can insert Bing Maps. The Bing Maps add-in for Excel lets you quickly turn a list of locations into a map that is displayed within your spreadsheet.

The Bing Maps add-in is nice if you want to just have a mapped display of a list of locations. To take your data mapping a step further try the Mapcite add-in that can be used to create interactive heat maps based on the data in your spreadsheet.

Lucidchart offers an Excel add-in that lets you create mind maps and flowcharts with the data that is contained in your Excel sheets.

Knoema is a service that offers a huge collection of data sets and maps for public use. The Knoema Excel add-in makes those data sets and maps available for use in Excel.

Need to randomly sort names in a roster? The Random Sorter Excel add-in can do that for you.