30 Apps That Improve Microsoft Office 2013

Microsoft’s Office Store has a number of apps (what we used to call add-ins) for the new Office productivity suite. These apps work in all Office 2013 and Office 365 versions, such as Home Premium and Small Business Premium, regardless of how you purchased the software. Here’s a roundup of 30 Office add-in apps for the new Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint 2013 to get you started.

Related: Microsoft Office 2013: Best New Features for the Enterprise

Based in Nova Scotia, Vangie Beal has been covering small business, electronic commerce and Internet technology for more than a decade. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.

Powered by Google Custom Search, the free Search the Web app (by The App Refinery) lets you search the Web within Word, Excel, Project and PowerPoint 2013. It’s a handy app that eliminates the need to switch between browser and Office applications to do a Google search. Image searches are also supported.

Gliffy Diagrams (from Gliffy) makes it easy to create professional diagrams to include in Office documents. The add-in features hundreds of shapes and templates to create flowcharts, network diagrams, floor plans and even technical drawings. It’s an easy-to-use alternative to Microsoft Visio: Simply draw in your browser with the Gliffy diagramming application. Gliffy offers a 30-day free trial; when the trial ends, Free, Standard and Pro subscription options are available.

Change Case (by Tyrant Ventures) is a free Excel app that can save you from making a lot of hand edits when you work with Excel files from different sources. The app works within selected cells to quickly convert text to upper or lower case, change words to proper case (i.e. only capitalizing the first letter) or start each cell with a capital by choosing the “Capitalize Each Cell” option. It’s an easy way to tidy up Excel sheets.

The Geographic Heat Map add-in for Excel 2013 (by Keyur Patel) provides a summary view of your data using a range of values across different geographies. Geographic Heat Map is a free app that lets you chart data across the United States and supports multiple values for a certain geographic location.

The Mini Calendar and Date Picker for Excel 2013 (by VERTEX42) makes it easy to enter and format dates from sources such as schedules, timesheets and project tracking sheets. By entering a range of values into your spreadsheet in a consistent format, a mini calendar is displayed, making it easier to work with budgets and timesheets. Mini Calendar and Date Picker is $1.99; a free trial version is offered.

This free app from Microsoft Research adds a new type of visualization to Excel data. The Microsoft Research Histogram can show you how many data points fall into different categories and illustrate the distribution of data. It will count and bucket data points and create a bar graph based on the frequency of those points.

Feature: 10 Cool Projects from Microsoft Research

If you need to generate data and pre-populate cells with random integers, reals or dates, the free Random Generator (from Tyrant Ventures) will do the trick. Use this app to fill the selected range with random real or integer numbers, populate selected cells with random dates within a range or to get random “true” and “false” Booleans in the selected cells.

Messageware TakeNote (from Messageware) allows you to add private, contextual notes to an email. The free add-in for Outlook lets you view and edit your notes directly from your email; notes can be viewed at any time by clicking on TakeNote within a message. Your notes are confidentially stored within your own mailbox.

Conversation Filer (from Bill Avery) helps keep your Outlook inbox tidy by filing messages into the locations that you’ve previously used for a particular conversation. It’s a handy, free app for filing a reply or forwarded email that breaks a mailing list filing rule, as Conversation Filer sends the new messages to be with the rest of the conversation in the appropriate folder.