7 great Office 2010 add-ins

Office 2010 comes with a ton of great features, especially in its ability to connect with SharePoint 2010 and provide the collaboration capabilities that modern Office users need. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. Here are seven great add-ins (or add-ons — what’s the difference anyway?) you should consider for Office.

Power Word for Word 2010: This add-in creates a new ribbon in Word that adds a variety of features, grouped into categories such as Research, Translation, and Task List. With Power Word, you can select any text in your Word document, then choose an option to search the Internet for that text (through a scientific article search, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, and so on) or translate the text into any of 32 languages using Bing translation services.

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KuTools for Excel 2010: This add-in offers a variety of features to help you view data differently in Excel (which is especially handy when working with large workbooks), maximize your working area, merge multiple Excel workbooks, and perform batch renaming of worksheets.

VisualBee for PowerPoint: This add-in, which has three versions (free, premium, and enterprise), helps you take a presentation and spruce it up in a few clicks. VisualBee does more than apply templates to a presentation; it analyzes the content of the slide deck and tries to enhance the presentation itself, especially through the use of images, of which there are thousands in VisualBee’s visual bank. After VisualBee has done its thing, you can tweak the presentation so that it’s perfect.

More Add-in for Word 2010: This add-in allows you to make expandable segments in Word documents. This is especially helpful if you work with long documents composed of the same blocks of text because it reduces the file space taken by the repetitive data. It also helps reduce clutter in your documents by letting you hide the items you don’t want to print (such as graphics), which can also make navigation easier.

iSpring Pro for PowerPoint 2010: This tool converts your PowerPoint presentation into a Flash presentation (.swf format). It can take animations, transitions, audio, and video and convert the whole shebang into a smaller deliverable than the original PowerPoint document.

Gist for Outlook 2010: Gist is a great add-on tool for helping you get the scoop (or the gist, thus the name) on any contact you have in Outlook. Gist helps you keep track of your contacts across all your inboxes and social networks from one place. The result in Outlook is that your contacts get dynamic profiles, with news about the person and anything they have tweeted or blogged about.

Canvas for OneNote 2010: This tool from Microsoft Office Labs allows you to see a high-level canvas view of all of your OneNote content. You can zoom, pan, and “fly” around your content to find what you are looking for so that you can find and add information easily.

Beyond these seven add-ins are dozens more you may be interested in. The PowerToys list for OneNote is a good place to explore such additional tools.

What add-ins (or add-ons) do you prefer to work with? Which ones can you not work without? Let your fellow readers know what you use.

This article, “7 great Office 2010 add-ins,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.