Excel 2003 has a nifty feature that will read a worksheet to you.
Speak to me! Oh mighty Office
If you’re hung-over after yet another Christmas lunch, you might be looking for a low impact job for the afternoon. Excel 2003 has a nifty feature that will read a worksheet to you.
The idea is that you can verify the contents of a worksheet from a document by having the worksheet called out while you keep your eyes on the source file. A nice idea and with a little planning it can work well. Sadly it’s a feature that was dismissed as a gimmick in many quarters. There was too much focus on the limited speech recognition abilities and not this less glamorous but useful option of speaking numbers or text.
Before you start, choose the voice that you want to use. In Control Panel | Speech | Text to Speech and choose the voice that you prefer. Microsoft Sam seems reminiscent of the Cylons (“yours to command”) so it’s really between the LH voices Michael and Michelle. I find Michelle the clearest voice, but you might prefer Michael. At the bottom there’s a slider to change the reading speed.
In Excel the reading is easy to find. Go to Tools | Show Text to Speech toolbar. The toolbar has options to start and stop reading, control the direction of reading (across rows or down columns). The last button is an option to read a cell at a time, advancing when you press Enter.
If you enter the data in a similar format to the original document then double-checking the data entry is fairly simple. It doesn’t matter how you get the information into Excel, by typing or scanning.
Note that in Excel 2003 the voice will speak the number as displayed, not the underlying whole number.
Over in Word the same option is less obvious. Choose Tools | Speech and the entire speech toolbar is activated in Windows. It will attempt to start speech recognition first, just ignore the attempts to configure your microphone. Highlight the text you want read and click on Speak at the Speech toolbar.
If Speak is grayed out go to the options menu (the down wedge on the right of the toolbar, next to the Help icon). Choose Speak Text from that menu.
I’ve used this feature to read a long document to me while driving or in a plane when I’m too tired to focus on the screen anymore. And at Christmas time it could be useful after a long liquid lunch when your eyes are more fuzzy than usual.
It would be obvious to have Outlook emails read to you as well – but we’ve not been able to get it to work. If you open a message, there’s a Tools | Speech option but the Speak button remains stubbornly grayed out.
Perhaps another example of “consistency across the Office applications” – a favorite mantra from Microsoft and always good for a Santa-like belly laugh.
