PerfectXL Wins Best Microsoft Excel Add-in at the Global Excel Awards 2026
We have some news we are still slightly stunned by. PerfectXL has won Best Microsoft Excel Add-in at the Global Excel Awards 2026, announced on 20 May at the Global Excel Summit in London! 🎉
The award is decided by a public vote, after a panel of judges from the Excel world picks the finalists. This year that panel included Leila Gharani, Ian Pay, Alan Murray, Danielle Stein Fairhurst, and Celia Alves. The shortlist we ended up on was not a soft one: AnalystPro, ASAP Utilities, Kutools, Monkey Tools, and OA Robot, all tools we have a lot of respect for. We are a team of seven people in Amsterdam, so being voted ahead of names like those is not something we expected, and we are genuinely grateful to everyone who put us there.
What the Best Microsoft Excel Add-in award is for
The category recognises an add-in that extends Excel in ways the native app cannot, is intuitive enough for wide adoption, and delivers measurable productivity gains. The PerfectXL Add-in does that through two features, and the second one is brand new.
The PerfectXL Highlighter makes the invisible parts of a spreadsheet visible. It lays temporary visual overlays over your sheet across nine analysis modes, so the things that usually stay hidden until they break become obvious at a glance. It separates formulas from hard-coded data, gives every distinct formula its own colour so you can spot exactly where a pattern breaks, flags references that point to other sheets or external files, maps how data flows from inputs to outputs, and surfaces the usual troublemakers like merged cells, hidden formulas, and inconsistent number formats. The Highlighter is free to use.
The PerfectXL Formula Inspector, launched in January 2026, is the feature we are most proud of this year. Long nested formulas are hard to trust, especially when you have inherited someone else’s model or you are looking at your own work six months later. The Formula Inspector pulls a formula apart into its component pieces, lets you spotlight a single element, and shows you the full chain of cells that depend on it. Verification that used to take an analyst hours can take minutes, and a formula that used to be a black box becomes something you can actually read.
An award is one thing…
But the real test is whether the tool holds up for people working in genuinely complex, high-stakes spreadsheets.
“A new gold standard tool to unpick complicated Excel formula logic and understand precedents and dependents. Two thumbs up.”
Tim Linke, Corporate Finance, RSM Australia
“It was very natural to replace my F9 evaluation tricks with the Formula Inspector. It evaluates every part of the formula, gives you a visual tree that updates as you click through it, and lets you keep working in the workbook while you inspect. Impressive.”
Vlad Mihanta, Flow Traders
Thank you
To everyone who nominated and voted for us, to the Global Excel Summit team for running the awards, and to the finalists who made this a genuinely tough category: thank you. And to our own small team, who shipped the Formula Inspector and kept sharpening the Highlighter, this one is yours. 🧡
If you have never tried it, the Highlighter is free. You can see what your spreadsheets have been hiding in about two minutes. Try the PerfectXL Add-in.
PerfectXL builds trust in Excel spreadsheets, making it easier to review, understand, and safely manage even the most complex workbooks. Learn more at perfectxl.com.
