@acarey5
With regard to your first problem. Remember, we do not have visibility to your computer, so we can't guess what might be happening (or not happening). It's up to you to provide adequate details to make the problem clear.
Second, Access is a tool for creating relational database applications. You can't treat it the same way you do an Excel spreadsheet. We discourage calculated columns in fields in tables in Access.
If you need or want to display calculations using formulas, you can do that in queries.
Third, I am aware of a few add-ins for specific purposes, but there are none that are "recommended" for everyone or for all purposes. What do you have in mind?
