Five Essential Add-Ins for MS Word

Do you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Word? I’m in it all day, and I’ve found several very useful add-in programs that can enhance every Word user’s experience. In this post, I’ll round up five of them that can start making you more efficient in Word today.

Word Hyperlink Checker. Do you create documents with lots of web addresses littered throughout them? If so, it’s helpful to have a way to check them all automatically to make sure that they’re working links. That’s where Word Hyperlink Checker comes in handy. It’s a free download, and it can check hundreds of hyperlinks in a document in seconds. It delivers lists of “suspicious links” as it encounters problematic ones.


SumsBox-W. The SumsBox-W add-in is a free trial, but it costs $19.95 if you decide you like it, which you probably will. It vastly improves Word’s ability to work with numbers and tables. It’s especially good for autofilling tables, and makes many kinds of filtering and calculating easy.

Fore Words Pro. Fore Words Pro is a very slick way to do document analyses. There are numerous types of analyses you can choose from. For example, if you are prone to a lot of word echoes when you write, the add-in can quickly summarize how many times you used words in your document. It also does a good job with DIFF checks, where it analyzes differences in parts of documents. It’s $17.95, but a very nice little add-in.

Get Started Tab for Word 2007. Are you using Word 2007? If so, definitely download Microsoft’s Get Started Tab for Word 2007. Once installed, it gives you a Get Started tab within Word where you can access tips, online demos, instructional videos and more.

Microsoft Save as PDF. Do you need to take Word or other Microsoft Office documents and save them as PDF files? Microsoft offers a free download that makes this easy, and you get options for e-mailing PDFs with it too.

Finally, if you want to get used to some efficiency-boosting tips for Microsoft Word, see my recent post on the topic, as well as the useful reader comments that came in.

Do you have any good Word tips or tips on useful Word add-ins?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post