A new navigation pane debuts in Excel. It is a feature for people with low vision who are using Excel with a screen reader. Take a look at how you can easily make your workbook easier to navigate.
Transcript of the video:
Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast episode 2418.
The Navigation Pane debuts.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill jelen.
This is a great feature.
It's an accessibility feature.
Imagine if you had to use Excel, but you had vision issues. So Microsoft talked to a lot of customers who have low vision or can't see and talked to them about their use of Excel and how hard it is to find things in Excel.
So, back here on the View tab. they've added a new Navigation Pane.
It allows someone with vision issues who's using a screen reader to try and find their way around the spreadsheet.
So on this workbook, I have the usual sheets: Title, Data, Buy The Booke, Subscribe and Closing Credits.
You see that each of those are kind of collapsed, but we're on the Data sheet here and it automatically found my pivot table: Pivot Table Four.
It found the Slicers: Sector.
And it found a chart that has the title of Sales By Region and Product.
Now, before I had a chance to try out the feature, I just kind of imagined if I had a spreadsheet, what the parts of a spreadsheet would be, and would they be able to find it?
Here I have a report with titles at the top, headings, the data, Total Row, Notes and a look up table out here on the right hand side.
And I was a little disappointed that to me the things that were important, the Navigation Pane wasn't really finding.
It was finding things that if you selected a cell and then pressed control asterisk you know is finding that as a particular range.
So if you, as a spreadsheet author, think that there's a chance that your workbook is going to be in the hands of someone who's using a screen reader to try and find their way around, you could really make things better.
I'm going to switch windows here to my Test Two.
What I did to try and improve the results is I created a few simple named ranges.
So I selected the data and called that Data.
I selected the look up table.
Notes are the notes at the bottom.
The total row is probably pretty important, so I named that.
And then the Title Section up there.
See and then the Navigation Pane over here on the right hand side really improves dramatically, right?
We have things like Title Section, Lookup Table, Data, Total Row, and Notes.
Alright, so if they click on Total Row then it will automatically take them to that area and their screen reader can begin reading that area.
Excel is an intimidating program for people who can see what's going on.
It would be a terribly intimidating program for people using a screen reader.
And this Navigation Pane, especially with a little bit of forethought naming their ranges, will make it much easier for people to find their way around your spreadsheet.
If you like this video, please down below, Like, Subscribe, Ring the bell.
Feel free to post any questions or comments down in the comments below.
Thank you for stopping by.
I will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
The Navigation Pane debuts.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill jelen.
This is a great feature.
It's an accessibility feature.
Imagine if you had to use Excel, but you had vision issues. So Microsoft talked to a lot of customers who have low vision or can't see and talked to them about their use of Excel and how hard it is to find things in Excel.
So, back here on the View tab. they've added a new Navigation Pane.
It allows someone with vision issues who's using a screen reader to try and find their way around the spreadsheet.
So on this workbook, I have the usual sheets: Title, Data, Buy The Booke, Subscribe and Closing Credits.
You see that each of those are kind of collapsed, but we're on the Data sheet here and it automatically found my pivot table: Pivot Table Four.
It found the Slicers: Sector.
And it found a chart that has the title of Sales By Region and Product.
Now, before I had a chance to try out the feature, I just kind of imagined if I had a spreadsheet, what the parts of a spreadsheet would be, and would they be able to find it?
Here I have a report with titles at the top, headings, the data, Total Row, Notes and a look up table out here on the right hand side.
And I was a little disappointed that to me the things that were important, the Navigation Pane wasn't really finding.
It was finding things that if you selected a cell and then pressed control asterisk you know is finding that as a particular range.
So if you, as a spreadsheet author, think that there's a chance that your workbook is going to be in the hands of someone who's using a screen reader to try and find their way around, you could really make things better.
I'm going to switch windows here to my Test Two.
What I did to try and improve the results is I created a few simple named ranges.
So I selected the data and called that Data.
I selected the look up table.
Notes are the notes at the bottom.
The total row is probably pretty important, so I named that.
And then the Title Section up there.
See and then the Navigation Pane over here on the right hand side really improves dramatically, right?
We have things like Title Section, Lookup Table, Data, Total Row, and Notes.
Alright, so if they click on Total Row then it will automatically take them to that area and their screen reader can begin reading that area.
Excel is an intimidating program for people who can see what's going on.
It would be a terribly intimidating program for people using a screen reader.
And this Navigation Pane, especially with a little bit of forethought naming their ranges, will make it much easier for people to find their way around your spreadsheet.
If you like this video, please down below, Like, Subscribe, Ring the bell.
Feel free to post any questions or comments down in the comments below.
Thank you for stopping by.
I will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
