Joys! Another post on the intricate un-wonders of Microsoft Excel. As all those who are unlucky enough to be Excel fiends know, there is enough about it that is a right royal pain in the ass. Anything that can make working with it a little easier has surely got to be welcome. Especially if it's free, given it's not always easy to get employers to actually give you anything involving £, and it feels morally wrong to make a personal investment into the mysterious lands of numbers in squares.

With that in mind, here's the Poorhouse's current top 3 free downloadable addons for others who spend double-digit hours a day inside this most gridular of programs. All guaranteed working for at least Excel 2003, and probably other versions too.

Update frequency around here is not impressive, the Poorhouse knows. He's mainly been trapped behind a sea of Excel for a few millenia so it feels. In which case, let's liven things up, by discussing...Excel.

Whoop. Yep, here's a handy tip of something used in recent days. Not original or mindblowing but handy if you don't already know it.

No spreadsheet is complete without a few formulae to manipulate those magic numbers. A formula usually looks like "=A1 + A2" to add the contents of cells A1 and A2. But what if you don't know, at the point of writing your spreadsheet, exactly what cell you want to use? Rather, you want the cell used to vary depending on what has been input in another cell. There are a few different ways, but a quick, easy and perhaps dirty - albeit VBA free - one is utilising the wonders of INDIRECT.