Excel Excelsior For Mac: a free formatting add-in for Excel on Mac

I am currently on a Mac, because it’s a much nicer thing to carry around. As I mentioned in About, when I started at OwnHome I was handed a MacBook, and that caused some heartache as I had to rewire my spreadsheet hands.

There’s a tool I use religiously in Excel on Windows called Macabacus (love letter here).

It does a lot, but the thing I can’t live without is the number/colour/border/format cycles. The full version doesn’t work on Mac. There’s a Macabacus Lite that’s apparently Mac compatible, but I’ve never been able to get it to add in to Excel for Mac. For me that’s a real frustration.

So I built my own. Excel Excelsior For Mac is a free add-in that puts the formatting I use most on one key each: numbers, percentages, multiples, dates, decimals, font and fill colours, borders, alignment and indent. My favourite is AutoColor, which colours a block by what’s in it (hardcodes blue, formulas black, links to other sheets green) so you can see at a glance which numbers someone typed in. None of this is revolutionary, but now that I have it back, life is good.