Terry OConnor - It's been claimed that the most widely used database program in the world isn't a database program - it's Microsoft Excel.

That might even be true because Excel is so powerful and so flexible that countless people use it for record-keeping and address books.

But Excel's power means myriad functions and they're not always easy to find or use. Which is where add-ons such as ASAP Utilities come in.

This little beauty sets up a new menu system within Excel, bringing more than 300 useful tools and functions to the fore.

ASAP, in effect, is a huge set of macros that make life so much easier for Excel users, both novice and expert.

Want to export a set of cells as an HTML table? Easy. Want to join the text in two columns together in one go? Easy. Want to transpose data with formulas, convert formulas to their values or apply a formula to selected cells in one fell swoop? Just as easy.

Similarly, you can remove all leading and trailing spaces from cells or centre a heading across a range of cells without merging. This might not sound significant . . . unless you've come up against Excel's strange ways of handling merged cells.

No matter what you use Excel for you're bound to find a few of ASAP's utilities that will save a load of time.

In my case I find the Export to HTML table extremely useful. This picks up most of the formatting in the selected cells, including font colour, size and weight, and automatically builds a table without the need to do it manually or having to remove all the bloat that Microsoft products insist on putting into HTML documents.

The code ends up on the clipboard and can usually be dropped happily into a Web document without further amendment. This can save hours over the course of an extended Webpage building session.

ASAP installs easily and can be set to run every time you start Excel, which is what I do because I wouldn't be without it. If for some reason you can't install automatically there are instructions for manual installation on the website.
The utility is provided by programmer and consultant Bastien Mensink, of The Netherlands, to promote his business. If he knows as much about other computing areas as he does about Excel he'll be well worth consulting.

ASAP Utilities 3.06 (1.6Mb)
www.asap-utilities.com
Freeware, updated regularly
Requires: MS Excel 97/2000/XP

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