After a while, you get bored of Excel so much that you eventually forget it is capable of doing some good things too. That is, with the right plug ins.
The must-have plug in is Daniel's XL Toolbox. It has some statistical options that may save you some bucks on the basic SPSS package. I particularly like the option to make charts publication ready.
Not really a plug-in, but simply stunning, is Juice Labs' Chart Chooser. An online gallery of templates you can download to get started with better-than-average graphs. The guys made Chart Cleaner in the past, which improve your charts, BUT it forces you to enable macros.
The people at Juice Labs have some more goods in store, amongst which I am simply stunned by the Excel Geocoding Tool. What this allows you to do is to have a field describing an address or a town (don't try regions or countries), and then with one press on the button obtain the longitude and the latitude. There is even a link to Google Maps. What's the deal? Well, I'm thinking of the Stata tmap user command. This plots borders on your graph, and with the geocoding tool, you can overlay regional capital town names, for instance, or add values on exactly that spot. I realize the tmap geographic projection is not the best in the world, but at least this procedure is logical, and I like that.
