Most people are familiar with Internet browser add-ins, but now there are over 2,000 add-ins for Microsoft Office 365 as well. We take a look at the best extensions for Word, with our preference for plug-ins that don’t cost anything. Some have paid upgrades, but the basic features we describe here are free to use.
Install add-ons
To install a plugin, open a Word document, and in the tab Insert you use the button Download add-ons. This will take you to the Store to find the desired application using the search function. Press the button Add to install the selected plug-in.
1 Font Finder: The correct font
You get the fonts in Word from a long alphabetical list. This is not convenient. Font Finder organizes the fonts in three tabs. The first tab Categories sorts them by their appearance: Classic, Handwriting, Fancy, Stencil and so on. Each category shows the fonts in their own form and displays them comfortably in large format. From the add-in you can apply the selected font directly in the document. The second tab shows your favorite fonts, fonts that you have provided with an asterisk on one of the tabs. The last tab keeps track of which fonts you have used recently.
2 Pexels: Royalty-free images
Of course, to provide a project with good photos, you have to take into account copyrights, unless you use the plug-in Pexels used. This is a resource where photographers make their work freely available. You can use all photos for free and it is not even necessary to mention the photographer. And nothing prevents you from editing the photos. In the tab Insert of Word the button appears after installation Open Pexels, and in the sidebar you search by subject and color.
3 Emoji Keyboard: 1300 emoji
With Emoji Keyboard you have more than 1,300 different emoji at your disposal and luckily that abundance of image characters has been divided into categories, such as Smileys & People, Animals & Nature, Food & Drink and so on. You place the emoji as text or as an image, and you can choose from six sizes. In addition, you can use six different skin colors with the smileys. All these images are under the Creative Commons License and are therefore free of copyright.
4 Vertex42 Template Gallery: Templates
Word comes with a ton of templates, but you can expand this library quite a bit with the Vertex42 template gallery. Vertex42 Template Gallery is a collection of 431 documents organized in clear categories for personal, educational and professional projects. These are Microsoft Word and Excel templates for telephone directories, a quarantine calendar, official documents, grid paper and so on.
5 Pro Word Cloud: word cloud
You don’t have to search for an online generator to put together a word cloud. Activate Pro Word Cloud and type or paste the dictionary into the Word document. With this plug-in you indicate how wide and high the cloud should be, you select a font and a color scheme. The words that appear more often are larger than terms that appear only once or twice in the list. You indicate whether you usually want to see the words horizontally, vertically or criss-cross each other. When you click on the thumbnail cloud, it will be copied so that you can paste it into another document.
6 Smart Tagger: Tagging Documents
After you have installed Smart Tagger, you will find the button in the tab Start. Just as you can add keywords to photos, it is possible to assign tags to Word documents. This can be a proper name, a project name, a location, a product name… Every word and every number series can be used as a label. Smart Tagger first checks whether the document already contains labels; in addition, the add-in itself will suggest tags based on the content. When you later enter a search query in Windows Explorer, the tab appears Search tools. With the item Other properties can you then Labels select and find documents based on these tags.
7 Symbol Search: faster with symbols
Microsoft Word has a nice set of icons in the ribbon located below the button Symbols. However, it often takes a long time to find the right symbol. Thanks to the smart and clear way in which Symbol Search manages the collection, you will find the right category faster.
8 MyScript Math: Writing Formulas
Word’s standard tool for writing complex math formulas and equations isn’t always intuitive. And it can be quite time consuming for such a formula to be on the screen. With MyScript Math you write the equations by hand on a touchscreen or with the mouse or drawing pad. The add-in interprets your scribble and translates it into a typed equation in Word. This is the easiest way to add equations to a document.
9 Easy QR Code and Barcode: Add QR code
In this case the ribbon gets a tab: Easy QR Code and Barcode. Quickly generate a QR or barcode that takes you to a web page, phone number, geolocation, or email address. For a QR code you determine the size with one controller and if you want to create a barcode, you have two sliders to determine the height and width.
10 Easy Code Formatter: edit code
To format code, all you have to do is select the text and open Easy Code Formatter that has appeared as a tab in the ribbon. There you can click the button Format text as code and the button Highlight selected line to mark certain lines. Via the button Code formatter settings open the right bar and you can try out different coding themes. Here you can also activate the line numbering option, which of course works much easier.
11 Scan & Paste: portable photo scanner
Use the Scan & Paste mobile app in conjunction with the add-in of the same name to load OCR documents and photos into Word, PowerPoint and OneNote. You take the photo and then connect the smartphone to the computer via the qr code that appears in the sidebar on your computer. This causes the Office application to retrieve the scanned photo from the online storage. The scanned photos are kept online for a week. Moreover, you do not have to create an account, while the scanned images remain available only to you.
12 Wikipedia: open source encyclopedia
While Wikipedia may not be the most reliable source to get your information from, it is and remains one of the largest open source encyclopedias. With the add-in you can browse the English Wikipedia articles in Word. In addition, you can use the Wikipedia plug-in together with the task pane Research, which is already included in Word by default.
13 Excel-to-Word Document Automation: bridging function
The Excel-to-Word Document Automation add-in is a mouthful of the add-in that bridges the gap between the two Office applications. You install it in both Word and Excel, because the intention is to connect Excel and Word documents. That way you can update and exchange the linked data without having to manually copy it. With the add-in you can link text, lists, tables, images and graphs. The basic version is free and with that you can process fifty basic documents for the first month, after which the use is limited to ten files per month.
14 Pixabay Images: Free images
To provide your presentations in PowerPoint and documents in Word with professional images, you can use a plug-in on Pixabay Images. You can also freely use this photo bank – even for commercial purposes – without needing permission or mentioning the author. After installation, the button to Pixabay Images is in the tab Insert. An advantage of this service is that you can search for the type of file (photo, illustration or vector), the orientation (portrait or landscape), the category (animals, backgrounds, buildings …) and the size.
15 Handy Calculator: calculator
If you are working on a document with a lot of calculations, Handy Calculator is a handy tool that can be found in the task pane of Word. The add-in doesn’t win a beauty prize, but it does include the basic features. And you do not have to constantly switch back and forth to, for example, the Windows calculator. You can focus on the content and do the calculations all in the same screen.
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